How To Do Very Pale Inhuman Skin Tones?
ebonartgallery
Posts: 270
in The Commons
There are tons of resources on creating great skin tones and even fantasy skins - but the one thing even Fantasy Skins for Genesis didn't seem to have is the hyper-pale ghost/vampire-like skin tone - something unmistakably non-human. I've tried searching and looking in the forums, but most discussion seems to revolve around, as you would expect, how to achieve more human skin tones :)
Any suggestions?
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The Lucrezia (V4) skins have that. Were transferred from RDNA to DAZ, I think.
Here are a couple
http://www.daz3d.com/prince-albane-ii-for-genesis-3-male
http://www.daz3d.com/princess-ali-ii-for-genesis-3-female
http://www.daz3d.com/vampellia-for-genesis-3-female-hd
http://www.daz3d.com/nosferatu-for-genesis-3-male
You can make your own with the Skinbuilder. Right now its just for Genesis and Genesis two but one for Genesis 3 is in the works. You can make just about any kind of skin with it. One of my absolute favorite things.
Edited to add that you can make and save recipes for use over and over and their is a pro version that lets you share recipes with other as well. I believe that the Genesis 3 version will also be a merchant resource. There is a thread on it over in the commercial section. I will track it down and post the link as soon as I get a break.
Here is the link to the thread on Skinbuilder 3
You need to look in the DAZ Store a bit more then you have, there is a deluge of such material.
Change the shaders. Lighten to white the skin and/or skin/lips/nails
Also might need to edit the SSS textures, as they can often be too dark.
For 3Delight or Iray?
In Iray using translucency with scatter/transmit and then putting the colors very pale is a good start; with this you can make even V7 look ghostly. Also make the SSS color paler/lighter, not red (and turn the SSS down to like 0.5, Daz skins have it as high as 2 sometimes and in that case the red overrides a lot of your other colors and gives you very "tan" characters).
With this technique you can turn any Caucasian character into a ghost-white vampire. Use metallicity 0.02-0.05 or so and turn on the top coat to maybe 30% to add more sheen because high transmission/translucency interferes with the visibility of glossy roughness.
It's still better to buy characters that actually have a paler skin to start with, mind you. People have already suggested some in the thread.
You're going to need to consider that just making the characters extremely white is not making them look inhuman, but albino or simply pale.
You need to consider changing the underlying bump & other maps to some sort of function that's not typical of earth. And then the coloration is then simply like styling hair.
I really like Skin Builder for a lot of things... and it has a specificly 'inhumanly pale' skin (with the intent that you can use it as is or tint it)
...I love Skinbuilder Pro. Was able to create a proper looking albino skin with it. As I understand SBP 3 should be out next month.
BTW there is one simple cheat you can use to lighten any skin. Go to the Surfaces tab, select a skin map then go to the Image Editor and adjust the Gamma setting. Repeat for each skin map.
One product that can help with this is Beautiful Skins for G3F which has a number of nice basic skin presets to start from.
http://www.daz3d.com/iray-smart-converter-and-advanced-skin-managers-for-genesis-3
Does a relally nice job of making paler but still human skin.
Here is Arabella (whose skin texture is already pretty pale) with transmission color and translucency color both set to white. I also knocked the saturation back on the reflectance tint from 40 to 20. Looks pretty white to me ;).
Laurie
And in this one, the transmission and translucency colors remain the same as above, except I changed the reflectance tint from a pale yellow to a pale blue. Has the effect of making the skin look even whiter.
Laurie
...actually albino skin is not "pure" white but lacks melanin (what causes skin pigmentation) so it is tends to be slightly more translucent (same for albino hair, brows, and eyelashes). Albino humans tend to have a slight pink and even some blue tint in their colouration due to blood vessels beneath the outer epidermis. Here is an albino character based off G2F I have been developing. This was done with Skin Builder Pro and rendered in Iray.
Admittedly hair is a real issue as most transmapped hairs do not have a good stark white colour to them and often the photographic lowlights in the texture tend to make them appear more grey. Turning off the texture map unfortunately makes the hair look like a white mass with no depth or detail. Ive also tried using the UHT2 shaders which does have a "Stark White" colour but even at 200% cutout opacity, it still looks too "thin" and scraggly and has a slight grey tint.
I made a decent albino hair by using translucence with a very light 'yellow' color.
And with the albino skin (yay Skin Builder!) upped the translucence of the skin a little and made sure translucent color was fairly red.
I bought him and his mate. Now, do you know where I can get a decent Stormbringer?
Silly question, does DZ write the ad copy, or do you? I never could understand the whole "he's weak because he's an albino" thing.
Thanks to everyone for the suggestions - I ignored the Skinbuilder because I assumed it would not work on the models I have - good to hear an upates version will soon be around.
I went back to fiddle with the very controls on Arabella you suggested, and dropped both of those when I noticed the reddish transmission color and lo! It worked exactly the way I wanted. More experimentation to ensue.
I do my uber pale skintoned characters by shopping the character textures and changing the Hue, Saturation and Lightness till I get what I want and then making use of subsurface and a lot of other wizardry until again I get the desired result..
The below image was done his way it is Thorne's Frangipani that I converted to Genesis 2 Female..