Portrait of a silent man by Patrick Eischen
I used this same texture to create the skin details. I turned it into a black & white image and created a mask of it in ZBrush. Now I was able to use the Inflate brush and sculpt all the little skin details. This technique is explained in this video tutorial. I also included some volume for the hair with a custom brush. Finally I created and extracted a displacement map of the head.
The skin shader
Now comes the hardest part: setting up the skin shader. For this image I used the Vreel Skin Shader, a plug-in shader for Cinema 4D that allows you to set up different layers of skin and which also includes a SSS effect. It is possible to setup parameters for secularity, surface and translucent. The shader is loaded in the Luminance channel.
As you can see on the left picture, most of the texture has been 'overwritten' by the shader. That's because I only loaded a color map in this test render. In the right picture I used an epidermal map and a subdermal map mixed together with a weight map. All maps are modified versions of the original color map.
This is how the luminance channel looked like after loading the different maps. The default color map is loaded into the standard Cinema Color channel.
