Thanks! With it off, I do notice that whatever is making the stubble seem like it protrudes(bump? normal? parallax? Been a long time since I've even thought about this stuff) seems a bit low resolution compared to the skin texture itself, as the light rises with the hair in every single case.
Still though, I'm genuinely surprised at just how well it held up without the DOF. I would've thought it'd be much worse, but frankly it looks great. Great demo.
Yup, bump map is indeed lower resolution (1024x1024) than diffuse skin texture (2048x2048).
It would be better to use higher resolution one, but these were the data I had at hand.
I also made a quick-and-dirty 2K gloss map so it should help a bit with adding surface details even if bump map is lower res.
Gloss variations give surprising amount of surface information - in another demo at one point of time I had bugged bump mapping and it took me a while to realize it was broken because gloss map was working so well.
Still though, I'm genuinely surprised at just how well it held up without the DOF. I would've thought it'd be much worse, but frankly it looks great. Great demo.