Skin Dot Mapping Component

Owned by Mircea Barbulescu-Sosoiu
Last updated: Mar 09, 2023
1 min read

Dot mapping (or dot gradient mapping) is used as a fast skin shading approximation solution, that is cheap resource-wise.

Asset requirements

  • dot gradient map texture which is used as a lookup table and describes how the light behaves on a curved surface (it tints the diffuse component).

Note!

The texture sampling needs to be set to Clamped. The U Axis in texture space is computed from the dot product of the surface normal and the incoming light direction.

  • a skin texture RGBA (GBA not used) where Red channel is used to control the V axis in texture space of the dot map texture.

  • dot map texture is provided with the Animaze Editor

The skin map represents a fake subsurface scattering map, which the whiter it is, the smoother the model’s skin will look.

If this map is missing, the shader will consider the upper half of the dot map.

Clamping the texture will prevent wrapping artifacts when mapping a texture onto an object and you don't want the texture to tile. UV coordinates will be clamped to the range 0-1. When UVs are larger than 1 or smaller than 0, the last pixel at the border will be used.