If you don't have the Microwave plug-in you can use LightWave 9.2's new surface baking camera. It’s pretty much the same, except it doesn't give you the option to bake out colour only. You can apply the textures using the same technique as above, however, make sure you set the diffuse to 0% and the luminosity to 100% – this will give you a pure colour output. By this stage, you should have two textures that look like something like those shown in Fig.09.

In order to combine the images shown in Fig.09 into a single map, I loaded up the projection scene and positioned a spotlight directly down the X-axis, and set it to cast ray traced shadows. The purpose of this was to cast light onto the front facing polygons only. I then used Microwave to bake an illumination pass into the UV map. This gave me a black and white image where the front facing polys were white and the side facing polys were in shadow – and therefore black. To combine the images I loaded both front and back maps onto individual layers in Photoshop – the front on top. I then loaded the baked illumination pass onto another layer and used the Select/Colour Range tool to make a selection out of the black/shadowed areas of image – i.e. all the side facing polygons. This selection was then used to delete the stretched side facing area of the front map. This technique is better illustrated in the video – click on Fig.10 to download.

Removing the specular highlights is a fairly simple, if not time-consuming, process. I did this by creating a new layer in Photoshop, set to Darken. Using the clone tool, set to 50% opacity and with sample all layers activated, I selected an area close to the highlight that I wanted to remove and cloned over the top. As you can see from the video, because the layer was set to Darken only the areas lighter than those being cloned were affected. Generally, specular highlights are fairly bright in comparison to the rest of the skin tone, so only the small spec areas are cloned over.

See Fig.11 for the Photoshop layer settings.

In order to use the simple skin shader node I had to make two more maps: epidermal and sub dermal. The epidermal colour defines the skin colour without any blood. I made this by simply de-saturating the colour map. The sub dermal map should approximate the layer of fatty bloody tissue below the skin. I made this layer by adjusting the curves, increasing the saturation and then blurring the image. Because it only defines the overall colour of the skin, there is no need to have a lot of detail, and things like hair follicles and eyebrows can be completely removed using the clone tool. It’s also important to remember that on areas such as the bridge of the nose, chin and forehead, there isn't so much fat under the skin, so it might be worth going over the map with the dodge tool and de-saturating these areas slightly.

See Fig.15 for the maps used with the simple skin shader.

The bump map is one of the easiest textures to make, assuming you have taken care when creating the colour map. It’s important to get this one right; I've seen so many fantastic models ruined by terrible bump maps. The quickest way to make a bump map is to load in the colour map, de-saturate it, and then use the high pass filter – as shown in the video (click on Fig.16 to download movie). After this, use the curves tool to adjust the map until there is a decent amount of contrast between the greys. If you need to add more detail to the wrinkles you can go in, as I have on this map, and paint them on. I like to do this for the areas under the eyes and the lips. For the eyebrows, which are generally dark, you will need to invert them. I found the best way to do this is to lasso them, cut them into a new layer, invert them, and then change the overlay layer option to screen (Fig.16 – click do download movie).