skin Cellulite and muscular skin normals

[MSM_Alice]

1 hour ago, DragAndPlace said:

Oh, that's quite interesting. I didn't know FO4 allowed custom shaders (nor do I know anything about shaders...). Thanks for bringing that up!

I do not know if Fallout4 allows for custom HLSL in the fragment shader of wherever they sample their normal maps; but if it did, there are certain simple formulas that one can use in HLSL for the fragment shader to combine a base normal map and a detail normal map in such a way that one holds the base info and the other holds just the additional details ( but not the info in the base).
And can do so before the matrix transform, just after the sampler. 


The classic approach is just to duplicate the entire, full-res base normal map and have the"Vanilla " version of the normal map, and the "enriched" version with the base AND the extra details (wrinkles/cellulite or whatnot), and interpolate between the two as needed.  And that works, but that approach it does not help a system that needs to serve multiple/various base normal maps  (and simply layer additively the same details on top)   
 

Edited Friday at 11:41 PM by MSM_Alice