I tried to improve the build-in shaders, to see if it would be enough for a decent skin shading. Often the specularity of virtual skin does not look right, so I decided to take care of that first. The standard shaders had only one fixed value for "shininess" per material and the specular intensity was not angular-dependent. So I extended the Bumped Specular shader to take an additional specular-texture, where the roughness is stored in the alpha channel and an fresnel term, that increases the intensity at very low angles.

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In the last weeks I concentrated on shader development, especially the skin shading.

I hadn't used ShaderLab, the shader language of Unity, before and the syntax was... well, a little bit tricky in the beginning. But after studying the build-in shaders a little bit, I quickly became familiar with it. The basic concepts of vertex- and pixelshaders I already knew from the time I wrote shaders in HLSL for a small testgame with Microsofts XNA Framework.

The first thing I implemented was a replacement for the ambient light. Ambient light is in most cases doesn't look very pretty, because it's the same color and brightness just everywhere. Instead of that I used a cubemap, to look up the color for each direction with something like this:

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I spend almost the last year finishing my exams at university and doing some jobs. In that time I worked quiet a while with XNA, Microsofts free Game Framework, learning the basics of shader programming and realtime rendering techniques like "Deferred Shading", as well as rigging, sculpting, painting,...

But now I finally started to work on my diploma thesis. My goal is to expore the uncanny valley a little bit, while creating a realistic character. As I did the some scribbles for the character, I noticed that I always start to create more fictitious, than realistic characters. Also it would be fun to develop such a character, it wouldn't suited my "uncanny valley" topic well. I finally decided to create a copy of a real person. Here I have the possibility to take a lot of reference pictures and texture samples and compare the results of real and virtual model.

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