Monday, June 1st, 2020 Posted by Jim Thacker

Reallusion previews SkinGen


Reallusion has posted a teaser video for SkinGen, the upcoming skin generation system for Character Creator, its software for generating rigged 3D characters for use in DCC applications and game engines.

The toolset, part of which will be available inside Character Creator, and part as a separate plugin, generates detailed human skin with wrinkles, blemishes and hair, at texture resolutions of up to 4K.

The next part of Reallusion’s digital human tools for animation and real-time work
Announced earlier this year, SkinGen builds on Reallusion’s existing Digital Human Shader, introduced in Character Creator 3.2 and sister application iClone 7.7.

Reallusion describes the toolset as a “dynamic skin effects layer stack”, with separate layers for normals, surface colour, blemishes, “acquired” details like tattoos and makeup, and body hair.

Users can build up a detailed skin surface by layering on readymade skin texture maps, some provided by specialist library Texturing.xyz, via a simple slider-based interface.

In the case of normal maps, that means a hierarchy of detail levels, from forms created by underlying muscles down through raised veins and wrinkles to fine details like skin pores.

Colour textures mimic the effect of stubble and body hair, skin blemishes and capillaries.

Export shaders and textures to iClone and Unreal Engine
According to Reallusion, users can create skin for characters of a range of ages, genders and ethnicities, previewing changes in real-time before generating the final texture maps at up to 4K resolution.

The toolset outputs directly to iClone, and to UE4 via Reallusion’s Auto Setup for Unreal Engine plugin.

According to Reallusion’s forum thread, all of the features shown in the video above will be available in the version of the toolset integrated in Character Creator 3.3.

A separate paid SkinGen plugin will provide further customisation options, including the option to import custom texture maps and a UV Transfer tool to port skin and makeup from DAZ 3D‘s G3 and G8 figures.

Pricing and system requirements
SkinGen is set for release as part of Character Creator 3.3 in July 2020. Reallusion hasn’t announced pricing for the plugin, but its previous Character Creator add-on, Headshot, costs $199.

The current release, Character Creator 3.2, runs on 64-bit Windows 7+. The full Pipeline edition costs $199.


Read more about Character Creator’s new SkinGen toolset on Reallusion’s forum