How to achieve wet skin effect with displacement?

Inkubo

I decided to try out making a wet skin effect by creating a geoshell for the first time. By chance I did it using the recently released Sawyer character, which uses displacement maps to create vascularity, visible veins in his neck, chest, arms...

Well, with the geoshell he looks like a monster because the shell is very visible and dark, and the veins poke through as bright white. I tried pushing the shell away a bit, but then it looks like he's sealed in thick plastic. I also tried making the shell close to the skin again and adding the same vein displacement map to the shell. That doesn't seem to work either.

Is this something that can be made to work, or is displacment on the skin just a no-no when adding a "wet" geoshell?

gypsyangel

Did you try turning the displacement down?

Inkubo

Never mind! The tutorial at http://thinkdrawart.com/how-to-get-wet-skin-in-iray works well. I must've had something wrong with the first geoshell I created.

If anyone follows that tutorial, there is one step I think the author forgot: After the wet skin effect renders the way you want, go into all the geoshell's non-skin parts and turn the Refraction Index all the way down. On my model the eyelashes were showing up as arcs of sweat floating in front of the character's eyes, but cranking down the Refraction Index made that go away. If you don't remember this step, the eyes will be milky instead of bright, and oddities may show up in other places.

Also on my character, the writer's suggested shell offset of 0.001 was too low: the shell rendered with black splotches and seams all over it that made me wonder if my Iray Water Thin file was messed up. But bumping the offset up to 0.01 made all that stuff go away, and the wet effect looks beautiful.

Inkubo

Here is a test render. If you look close, you can see that the veins are not covered by the sheen of sweat. I'd still like to fix that, if there is a way, but at least this problem isn't noticeable unless you're looking for it. I'd also like to hear suggestions for creating a better opacity map for the beads of sweat. The one I made looks too regular when viewed up close.

PS: I read the guidelines on dealing with nudity, and I think this image is OK because the sensitive areas are cropped out.