I tinkered a small skin shader prototype, it’s basically artistic wise without some fancy paper physical correct formular and based on MeshStandardMaterial, just for behaviour and look, while being very cheap in performance without post- or pre-processing.
I’ll probably extend it further also to properly work with all kind of skin tones and make some effect parts with parametersl. Also want to get some wax-factor and fix encoding.
Head with the skin shader
Default material in the examples
Notice in my scene i use sRGB encoding, it’s only to make the difference visible, especially around the chin, neck and eyelids.
The light setup is the same except the ambient. Adding the ambient the translucency becomes more subtle the more lit the surface is as below. However, it’s still a more of a experiment yet and a bit hacky. You see with the ambient it becomes quite bright, so i’ll probably need to make it work more correct in that regard. Also that it works with different skin tones, gamma etc.
Even though my game is more stylized i’d like some more organic and wax kind of look for the skin, but without adding heavy cost, especially not involving screen space processing just for this.
Demo