newbie question about how to change skin shaders

Drekkan

K so this was something I wanted to do but am not sure how to do it or if it can even be done at all for that matter.

I have a white woman character I wanted to turn into a darker skin tone so she looks latina BUT I like her iray default skin details (the morphs are not a concern) in particular certain.. um.. well two certain ... umm... area's... yeh I won't go into it (lol) but I think you get the idea.

Can you simply change the skin tone/colour (darker in this case) whilst keeping the skin details of the character the same? can you add skin shaders from another character as long as its in the same genesis model type?

Hope I explained it alright I'm really not up on the correct terminologies.

Quasar

One simple solution is to go into the surfaces tab and select all the surfaces you want to make darker while holding ctrl down. Once you have them selected, change the defuse color from white to something a bit darker, maybe a light brown tint. You can fiddle with the tint and darkness until you find the color you like.

Drekkan

Quasar said:

One simple solution is to go into the surfaces tab and select all the surfaces you want to make darker while holding ctrl down. Once you have them selected, change the defuse color from white to something a bit darker, maybe a light brown tint. You can fiddle with the tint and darkness until you find the color you like.

I'll try that. Thx.

Quasar

If you are using Genesis 8, this product works great for making darker skin. It has the added bonus of adding wetness and tan lines as well if that is of interest. 

outrider42

You totally can. You have a ton of options on how to do it, and any one of them may work depending on how the character's materials are designed.

With your character highlighted, look over to the surfaces tab. In the surfaces tab, click on your character's name to open up more options. Among those you will find listings for 'skin' and 'surfaces'. If you click on skin then it will highlight all of the skin maps except for lips. If you double click surfaces, you will see a list of all the surfaces your character has. So you can click on skin, and then hold CTRL down and click lips. Now you don't have to alter the lips, but often the face and lip UVs overlap a bit, and if you don't include the lips with the rest you might see the lips look really out of place. So its often better IMO to add them in for this.

Now you should see all the skin surfaces and lips highlighted. With that, you can tackle this so many different ways, I can't even list them all. Because everything here could effect the color, and again, it depends on how the character was designed as to how each effects it. So here are some different things to try.

The simplest is the base color near the top of the surfaces. Click the box with the color in it, and you can do whatever you want. You could just turn the brightness down, or shift the color a bit. Do this in moderation. You can easily turn your character blue or neon red or orange here. You just have to test it out.

Another option is translucency weight. Turning this up *usually* makes for a darker skin. Again, you just have to play with it and test. Right under this is translucency color. If 'base color effect' is set to 'scatter and transmit', then you will have an additional color box for 'sss reflectance tint'. So there are 3 parameters here that can drastically alter your color under translucency. With some experimenting you can create a more natural color than just altering the base color alone. But this might take some time.

But there are more settings. If 'top coat weight' is in use, it has a color box as well. This can create a skin with a radiant glow. The standard gloss settings can also effect color. Generally though, you probably don't want to mess with them too much.

Then if 'thin walled' is set to off, which most modern characters are, there will be even more options below that. These can greatly effect color as well, however the way they work is not as apparent as the previous settings, and I am probably not the best for explaining them. It is sort of like translucency, but more related to how the light is absorbed and transmitted by the surface (sub surface scattering). In general, you probably want to avoid these until you get more comfortable with things. If you do alter them, do so in small increments.

You could also edit the textures directly in PS or whatever and change their tint or color temperature. That will also preserve detail. Save these as new textures and use them to replace the textures you currently have.

Yet another option is you can apply shaders to the skin from other character material presets. There are products out there that help make this easier. To apply another character's material preset without using the textures, first make sure you have the material preset, not the character preset. Then with your current character highlighted in the surfaces tab, hold down CTRL and click the left mouse button. A box will pop up containing two choices. One lets you choose between all surfaces or just the ones you have selected, the other option is to either replace or keep your current textures. If you select 'ignore' it will apply that character's material settings but not replace any actual textures. This is fun to experiment with, and not limited to just characters. But your results will vary wildly depending on how the characters are deigned. You can use this trick for ANY surface material, which is extremely handy sometimes.