For the scatter map you can bake a thickness map to save time, however, I prefer to hand-paint in my values for the scatter map as I feel like I have more control as to how the subsurface scattering will look. The scatter map is primarily used to tell Marmoset where light should penetrate the skin and where it should not. Fattier areas of the face like the lips, ears, nose, and chin all end up being lighter values on the map, and places that are closer to bones like the zygomatic arch, mandible, and forehead will all be painted darker values. Depending on how much fat a character has in their face, this map will look different. It’s important to think about the underlying forms of the character like, and that is what really makes this map fun to make.

The gloss/roughness maps are used to tell the programs how smooth or rough a surface is. I like the face gloss map to be fairly uniform in value so there is a nice even sheen across the face. However, the nose and lips tend to be slightly glossier as they tend to be smoother surfaces. I pulled out these values in the map using a soft white brush in Photoshop.

I use the spec map to show how much light is reflecting from the surface and how bright it is. I like to start with a map that has some pore information in it, like the blue channel on the displacement map. I then take a soft white brush on a new layer and build up white in area’s that tend to have more specularity such as the nose, cheeks, and lips. This map usually takes a few iterations between Photoshop and Marmoset to dial in the right values to make sure the right areas are popping. While this map can take a little more time, I believe that it is one of the most important elements to the face to make sure it really reads to your audience as skin.

The last thing I created was peach fuzz for this character to use for the fuzz mask using Maya’s XGen. I followed how to transfer attributes based on Vadim Sorici’s tutorial. Once the normals are transferred, I baked out a color map so that I could use the peach fuzz as both a mask and as information in my gloss and spec maps.

In the surface normals, I added a detail normal map to help create a finer level of detail when zoomed in. I am using a map purchased on Texturing XYZ.

After texturing the skin, I brought the gloss, normal, roughness, and albedo map textures from Photoshop into Substance Painter and loaded them into my texture set settings. I noticed that in my war paint/makeup reference that the makeup was slightly more shiny than the skin. To mimic this I created a fill layer with ‘color’ and ‘rough’ turned on. I changed the color to black and moved the roughness up to around .65. Once the layer was set up I added a black mask. I find painting in masks in Substance incredibly powerful because it allows for a non-destructive workflow. With a mask, I can easily go back at any time to the layer and quickly add or subtract from the mask. With a soft round brush, I turned down the flow and stroke opacity in brush settings and slowly started to build up the black color of the makeup around the eyes.