V4 Skin Realism Kit

The folks over at Faceoff are at it again, and their V4 Skin Realism Kit is on sale over at DAZ. These people really know the Poser shader tree, so I decided to grab the product and give it a try.

It's quite impressive. Poser's renderer is (weirdly) not the best one out there for skin. It can't even do sub-surface scattering, which is pretty much required for realistic skin renders. The V4 Skin Realism kit "fakes" sub-surface scattering, and does a pretty good job of it too. It also allows you to add some realistic mottling to the skin, and adjust the shininess, oiliness, stuff like that. You can add freckles, even. It has a nice, easy to use interface. It works with *any* mat, and just adjusts the shaders as needed. Really makes all your V4 skin mats much more versatile.

Here are some test renders I did. These were all done in Poser 7 with the settings cranked to maximum (Firefly renderer, automatic settings dragged all the way to the right). I used DM's Luciana mat. DM ships the Luciana mat with a default, no shader setting, and also with DM's own special shaders. So I compared them all.

Here's the basic mat, no special shaders at all:



Here's the same mat, with DM's special shaders:



Same mat, with V4 Skin Realism applied:



Same mat, with V4 Skin Realism applied using different settings, to add lots of freckles:



Pretty nifty. :)

DM's special shaders are darn good, but they only come with Luciana. The V4 Realism kit works with any mat.