Pale skin for men comparable to Mousso's beauties?
Sera
Posts: 1,675
I am struggling to find a vampire-pale skin for men that is as nice in quality as the skins made by Mousso. The problem is that I'm trying to use a Mousso skin in a scene with a pale male vampire, and the female's skin is so nice, it makes all the male skins I have look awful.
Half the battle is making a guy's skin lighter. Seems like even the pale guys in the store come out pretty tan under regular lighting. Making a skin darker is easy, but when it comes to making skin lighter, I have really floundered. I like the depth of skin with high translucency, but not how dark it makes things. It seems like no matter what translucency color I use, the skin gets darker at higher values.
What are some high-quality skins for G3 or G8 men? How do other people make skins lighter? Are there any good vampire-pale skins out there for men that aren't completely flat/playdough looking?
I would add a pic to illustrate, but imgur is giving me grief.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
224 S 200 W, Suite #250
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I am considering picking up one of the following:
Nikolai for Dain 8 and Genesis 8 Male
Karl HD for Landon 8
FW Quinton HD for Michael 8
MR Gerho HD for Genesis 8 Male
They all seem pretty pale, but the palest looking one (FW Quinton HD for Michael 8) doesn't seem to have a lot of detail.
If anyone has these and can offer advice, I'd appreciate it.
Second this and am watching this thread for the same reason.
When I get a new character I will throw on some hair, clothes and poses and then render to get an ideo of them.
There is no special lighting, just use the default HDR (sometimes the headlight on the camera).
No background, just transparent
composited below - l to r Karl, Nikolai and Quinton. I don't have Gerho
Clearly, Nikolai out of the box is the palest of those.
I've been trying to do a writeup on this for a friend who's thinking of joining me in rendered Batman fanart land, because it's a pain. :'D
My rec for a G8M character who loads with white skin out of the box is Draven by TwiztedMetal and HotLime3D (not sold at Daz so I can't link to him, but just googling the name and artists should turn him up). He has what I would call believable white skin, with visible detail and translucency. The only caveat is that the bundle with him and Hecate appears to be missing their alternative eyebrow materials, which I keep forgetting to follow up on.
My go-to for pale skin otherwise is the Aiko 8 Altern8 presets, which will turn many skins white if you use the no maps versions. It's hard to predict which ones will work, but pale skins where a lot of the color seems to come from translucency are a good bet.
I actually use G8F skins a lot, because it's hard to find a male skin that 1) looks white, 2) looks more creepy pale than beautiful goth pale (your mileage may vary if that's what you're going for), and 3) does not have a lot of stuff I would have to remove if it doesn't work. One of my Joker models has Tasha 8's vampire skin with an Aiko preset, and I previously used Absinthe with the same preset. My other model uses Dolb's skin with an Aiko preset, but he's meant to look pretty messed up.
I have Karl and Quinton so I rendered a few pics both out of the box and with Altern8. Quinton's paleness is very lighting dependent and the preset doesn't work well on him.
Some others that I have that I know work are Fergal for Landon 8 (vampire skin) and Fiore (his eye mats need reapplying afterward because they get mega bloodshot). I also tried the presets on Mousso's Vernon and Armand, and they come out pretty pale if you're looking for something a little more on the human side.
With apologies to the artists; these are not especially flattering pics because I didn't have time, but they're all actually beautiful when lit well and posed.
Have you tried adding a white or very pale color overlay at some percentage using the additive blend with the layered image editor? I'd try that on the translucency color materials first, and also the diffuse or base color and decide which was better. You'll have to go through each of the skin, lips, and nail surfaces seperately and use the same color and percentages. Watch out as it seems a lot of charcters use completely different shaders even for the nails than they do for skin and I've found I usually have to mess around with the nails for quite a while to get the right look. I should add that this method just won't produce good results sometimes, while othertimes it works perfectly.
Probaly easier to do it in GIMP or photoshop, but works great to test torso or face and see if it's even worth firing up other software to complete the job, or if you don't have or don't want to learn other software.
Edit: You can also mess around with the different base color effects and depending what you're going for, maybe get what you want that way too.
There is a product Tyrone for Darius 8 and included with it is a very pale Albino African albino skin material set. You can leave it as is or adjust the tint slightly pinker or slight yellower/brown quite easy. Because it's really albino though the cheeks are quite flush.
You don't actually need Darius 8 to use the product though if you're pinching pennies.
There is also Kjaer 8 that is the palest male DAZ Original although it's quite pink and freckled a skin material set that isn't really associated with old school vampire makeup from 30s Hollywood.
Alexei Materials for Scar 8 and Genesis 8 Male is a product that is materials only. Renders pink.
Luke HD for Genesis 8 Male
Matias HD for Genesis 8 Male
I'd go with Tyrone for Darius 8.
The best male textures I have seen are 'InTheFlesh' ones, mostly over on RenderHub. Look for Dante DMC5, NeroDMC5 or Vergil DMC5 and then, if you need to, take the textures and do a Hue/Saturation/Lightness tweak and increase the Lightness in a graphics package. The detail in the ITF textures is stunning, at least as good as Mousso's. https://www.renderhub.com/intheflesh. I have tweaked a skin texture (CB Guilia) in the same way, but opposite direction with the NSFW image here: https://www.renderosity.com/rr/mod/gallery/an-invitation-/2982918/ to give it more depth of colour, so it does work.
Also, Mousso does a couple of male characters, so the same tweaks could be done to her male textures instead and you'd have a known quality starting point.
Regards,
Richard
I have recieved complaints about his body shape, but the skin on my albane character is quite pale https://www.daz3d.com/albane-III-for-genesis-8-male-with-dForce-hair
Here's an example of what I meant using V8. I would use Gen8 to show, but they use monochrome translucency mats by default and I didn't feel like going through and changiing them all to use the same mats as diffuse like most characters do now apparently. Also V8 already has a slightly different translucency mat than her base mat, it's a bit lighter and less satuarated maybe.
All default render settings, default HDRI dome light, no fancy anything. The first is her default, next with 15% white additive blend in LIE on the translucency, and last with 15% additive also on the base mat. I left the translucency ammount alone, it's cranked to .9 on her by default. To my eye details don't suffer at all and in some cases even get enhanced this way. Lighter surfaces do require more shininess to look shiny though, so she's looking a bit dryer now, offset by her new dark lipstick because i didn't bother to change that.
No substitute for a new purchase of a new figure but can multiply the usefullness of every figure you'll ever have.
I like this guy for pale skin : https://www.daz3d.com/prince-albane-ii-for-genesis-3-male
Thanks, everyone! This has all been really helpful.
I already own Prince Albane for G3 and was planning to use him for some of the bad guys in my project. But for my Love Interest, I wanted something a little more human. To that end, I think I will experiment with Altern8, since I already own that, and Dante from InTheFlesh, since he is free and does look pretty good. After that, I may pick up some of the figures you all have linked. A lot of them look *really* nice.
I will definitely try this at some point as it sounds like a good idea.
I hope you all have a great week!
Edit: So it was only the morph of Dante that was free. Also, it seems like I can't use these InTheFlesh characters commercially, and since I do want to put my game on Steam when it's finished, I will have to go another route. (We need more emoji in the forums. The poop emoji would be perfect right now.)
I thought I would throw a few other things your way:
https://www.daz3d.com/ecvh0-s-iray-pale-skin-shader-for-genesis-8-male-s
https://www.daz3d.com/genesis-3-male-merchant-resource-light-skin
I have been experimenting with Altern8 and found a skin tone that I *really* like. It's Michael 7 on a G8.1 with Charlotte 8 Altern8 (no maps) setting.... with a funky white point. Whoops.
So I will have to keep experimenting to try to recreate that same color with a regular white point.
https://imgur.com/a/frPpIaZ
It would be nice for once not have to play with the Transmitted/SSS settings to remove the brown/redness that many character's skins have. So many of them look like an ad for Coppertone.
Or you could just use https://www.daz3d.com/fw-vincent-hd-for-genesis-8-male that works on G8/8.1 without having to modify the skin (which includes extra translucency settings of 50%, 65% and 80%, plus brow/no-brow, facial hair [painted] and other useful settings)
https://www.daz3d.com/fwsa-chace-hd-for-genesis-8-male
Already pale by default, also by FredWinkler like Vincent in the above comment. I think with a bit of translucency you can up the paleness even further. The textures and shape are quite good, I can easily see the character out of the box as a vampire.
yeah, that's good
LOL I was just thinking of that Icprincess.
Swapping the UV between male and female gives you a wider variety of textures for your male characters and female character textures do tend to be more on the lighter side compared to their male counter
Looking good! :D
One thing I should note for anyone coming across this thread and wanting to use the new PBR shader is that the Altern8 technique only works well with the Uber shader. Adjusting the gamma of the skin textures can give good results if you have access to graphics editing software, and if you don't, Ultimate Iray Skin Manager also has that option. If you lighten the actual textures, keeping the original maps in the translucency slot will help the skin retain a lot of detail.
I have been using the Altern8 settings a lot today- they are very easy and effective. To tweak those results more toward blue or rosy red, I added diffuse LIE overlays with very pale colors (pale blue or pale purple for example) at 10% opacity and had some good results. I had better results with Altern8 starting with medium skin tones than light ones.
One thing I learned the hard way is that you should remove eyebrows BEFORE making changes to the skin, not after. Doing it after can lead to seriously messed-up results. I was able to undo a step and then transfer the no brow temp files manually though, so at least I didn't lose all my work. I saved material presets every time I found a result I kind of liked, and now I have ten or so skins with varying degrees of paleness. They are all based on M7, since I like the detail in his skin, but if I want to switch base skins, I can use the same techniques to achieve similar results. One day, when I'm feeling feisty, I will go through the trouble of modifying the base skin diffuse maps in gimp. My guess is this would produce some nice results.
Right now my big problem has nothing to do with "how" but rather "which": I can't decide how pale I want my guy to be. I am currently leaning toward a peachy pale color that is less extreme: https://imgur.com/1ndlRXB. This is one of the skin settings I made with a very pale diffuse blue color, and a somewhat darker (but still pale) blue overlay at 10%: https://imgur.com/wPHVkxx. I really liked that one by itself, but when I put it next to the leading lady, it was too extreme. Thankfully, this project is something I'm doing for fun, so I have time to sleep on these decisions and try lots of stuff out before locking in my choice.
I added the G8 UV swap to my wishlist. I have the G3 UV swap product already, but I am finally making the switch over to G8 so I guess I better pick it up. I also added Chace to my wishlist. Not sure if I will use him, but he is cheap and I need to start loading up on G8 males anyway.
Note: I was unable to get the same really nice results (https://imgur.com/zlct2r0) with a regular white point. Maybe it is possible by changing the base maps, but I just could not figure it out with the methods I was using. A pale yellow white point really seems to give skin a nice rosy-pale boost. I am not against doing some renders with a pale yellow white point if it makes my guy look better without making everything else look weird. I will definitely be keeping it in mind in the future.
Thanks to everyone who chimed in and offered advice. It has been extremely helpful.
Torment 8.1 has just been released and has a very nice pale skin option:
He does! The redness around the eyes is way less standout than it looks in the promos, IMO. Here he is out of the box under the default lights and a studio HDRI.
Edit: You can make him paler by giving him a more saturated red SSS color and near-white transmitted color, and/or putting his SSS maps in the base color, although it gives him more of an "I died of consumption in 1814 and haven't slept since" look. This is with his maps changed, his SSS at 248 120 122, and his transmitted color at .95 .84 .83.
And I really like the results you're getting with Altern8. :D
Leonard's human skin is pale and I added a version with underlying bluish veins to give him more of a Vampire look ;-)
He might work as well ;-)
I really llke the look of Leonard - which shader is he using, PBR or the older one?
Legacy Iray-he was actually done before PBR was handed to us PAs but some of his settings aren't actually included in PBR so it worked out ok as far as that goes.
And thanks! ;-)
Thanks for the info - it's not a show-stopper, I was just interested to know. I'm still debating how much to buy - I may wait till tomorrow and see what else (if anything) appears.