Hello. I’m starting to work in game development and I’m curious is there a way to make a human skin diffuse map out of a shader, let’s say this one: http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/shaders/c/human-skin--2 ? I can only assign diffuse / normal / specular map inside the game’s engine and not the entire Maya shading network...hope that makes sense.

Normally from inside Maya renders I create some simple shaders and add diffuse / normal / specular maps. It it possible the other way around described above?

Thanks.

P.S. Painting skin traditionally with Photoshop is hard…

This is something is really successful sometimes and less so other times...depending on the shader.
Your example of that advanced skin shader would probably not bake out well because it reacts to the facing ratio of the camera and also light intensity. When Maya bakes out a shader of this kind the dynamic attributes become locked in one position. The texture is not ideal because it will bake from one angle/lighting and therefore look a bit off in any other setting.
But, you can still get some pretty good results...just keep this in mind.
All you need to do is select the surface that the shader is assigned to and shift select the shader in the Hypershade (it doesn’t matter what order you select these in.)
Then, in the Hypershade window go to “EDIT - Convert to File Texture (Maya Software)” and select the option box.
Adjust you settings to get the quality of texture you need and Convert.
A bit of trail and error goes a long way to getting the perfect results.
This will use your UV layout as a guide to create a single file texture of your shading network.
This should be sufficient for most needs.
But, there is a whole world of advanced ways to Bake textures with Maya using Bake Sets...definitely worth you time if you plan on doing this a bunch. Start with searching Maya help for Bake Sets and follow the links until your head explodes.
Good luck.
~Ben

Thanks a lot I’ll do some reading :)