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You can go into the geometry editor & create new surfaces for the palms and fingernails and areas as needed to assign different color alterations to.
Looking at my own palm, I'm not sure how this would work...there is a color gradient from the tan of the top of my hand to the palm; would there be a sharp demarcation line with the new geometry. Moreover, we are still stuck with the shapes of faces, noses, and other proportions being off for lack of ethnic morphs.
Yeah the palms difference would have to be masked. Trying to sharply demarcate surface areas that should be blended gently has always been a mess. -cough-LIPS-cough-
If you've ever looked at any one's skin it's a gradient all over the body. It's easier to see the gradient in pale people though where you can see areas with higher blood flow and lesser blood flow, bruising, and all sort of other varientions.
Everyone is focusing on the skin... the skin really isn't the issue. It's the unique features that I can't sculpt myself.
There's very distinct and different nose and lip shapes between different ethnicities and tennorphs to create these right now is extremely lacking.
Also, regarding the comment about sales, out of the very few ethnic characters there are, very few are well put together and textured. So it's not surprising they don't sell well.
I'm really, really hoping for a release of a nice African character ASAP.
The morphs head packs can do those even easier than the skin.
I actually had a palm mask already incorporated into my shader, but I guess the difference in color was too subtle in my previous render. Here's a test render of M8's hand with a greater contrast between the palm and the back of the hand.
That looks so different from my hand; my palm is just a bit more tanned than Michael 8...
Getting warmer?
The skin looks gray to me.
Also, the palms could be much lighter.
Keep going, you'll get it! :)
A little more tan, so close!
You said you where doing procedural so color gradients between adjoining surfaces boundaries should be easy compared to manually creating masks or editing textures pixel-wise. You need more red in the translucency color channel too.
I'm just using textures sets that came with appropriate prior purchases.
Thanks for the encouragement! In the meantime, here's a slightly different twist on this thread's topic. I think head morphs have been mentioned, and this is one of those times when cross-gender morphing can come in handy. This is not technically M8. It's a character based on G8F via the G3M clone morph. This is useful because it allows me to use the Billie face morph from the EJ Ethnic Beauties pack. To shake things up a bit more, I decided to go somewhat lighter but still clearly in the African range.
The darker character looks a bit desaturated for a reason. I'm trying to mimic the look of very dark Africans, whose skin actually does seem to be a bit less saturated, at least to me (and maybe only to me).
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. The character's shader is not completely procedural. There are maps involved; they're just Caucasian maps. The blackening of those maps is the procedural part.
Part of it is that although the palms and under the fingers are lighter, the creases are relatively darker (see Divamakeup's example)
The lack of quality darker-skinned characters is at least partially due to the relative paucity (compared to Caucasian resources) of black photographic full nude models. Raiya (the Queen) seems to have a source that no one else uses, although she has re-used darker skins a few times on different characters—for example, Keira for Stephanie 5 / Sapphire for Victoria 7 and Nala and Nia / Olivia for V5 / Kelly for Victoria 7; (there's a male example as well, but I can't be bothered to find them). A couple of Saiyaness' (the Princess) skin sources betray that their owners may have lived harder lives (Imari's jaundiced eyes and eye bags, Nyarai's darkened lower eyelids and rough soles—are they from the same resource?) than their/her Caucasian counterparts, which could be their/her financial incentive for submission to having their/her entire body photographed. Finally, the primary sources for skin resources are reportedly located in Eastern Europe, which has historically had a lot less inhabitants of African descent.
When lesser character creators release people with non-photographic-looking skin textures, I pass on them (having a hard drive peppered with their previous attempts). Other customers are evidently passing on them as well. And this, I think, is the basis for the oft-repeated, "darker characters don't sell as well." If you peruse Raiya's and Saiyaness' stores, you will see that they apparently have no hesitation at releasing darker-skinned characters (Raiya Genesis 3: 25% dark-skinned, Saiyaness: 9/7 split light/dark); indeed, Raiya told me that she would like to make more, but there are so few skin resources. And she said that her darker-skinned characters sell as well or better than her Caucasian characters, Monique 6 being only one instance of this.
For authentic African-descended morphs, I suggest GenX-ing (the full monty) reciecup's Generation 4 products (which are being retired at an alarming rate) at the other store, and any other African characters that you like from previous generations. reciecup's head morphs alone capture so many previously nonexistent types in Daztopia. And samsil (at the other store) has two characters that provide excellent unseen-in-Daztopia types. I have found his skins to be unusable for my purposes, although his African hair more than atones for this (wish they had more morphs though). After over a decade of Poserverse/Daztopia, there are enough African morphs and skins to fill a big story, but the customer will have to fix their own plate.
As a PA for 8 years making characters, no matter how good an ethnic character is, it will NEVER get as much sales as a caucasian character. That's the reality. If a PA wants to make money, they will not start with an ethnic character. Keep in mind that the majority of ethnic characters that was released so far where PA buyouts to DAZ, not PA releases because of the risk.
I would adjust your monitor settings, this is greyish-purple. Also as a black male, making a black character encompasses more than just getting a palm area correct. The pores and skin texture is vastly different as well, so a procedural skin based on a caucasian texture will never look right. Also not all black people fit this description, so you have to be careful not to make a distinction that when you make a black character (especially an African American as they have different features than a African character.), that you go for more stereotypical features. For example, my palms don't have the feature your're trying to make.
My husband's palms and soles are very light, but there is a fairly clear line of demarcation from the dark skin of his body to these areas. There is a bit of 'shading' or 'blending' for lack of better terms that transitions the colors, but they're clearly light with the creases in his palms being dark. However the creases on the soles of his feet are not dark, they're light just like the rest of the sole.
I'm looking for the male equivalent to my G3F character, there's no way I could get ger kind of features with just using the basic morphs we have right now for G8M.
A few weeks ago I bought B-Jay for G2M by samsil at rendo. (I also got the Fo Shizzle outfit, Top Fade hair and High Dreads hair). The whole store was on 60% off sale, so couldn't pass them up. About a year ago I got the Survet Leust Pack too. Samsil also has great female hairs and a nice female character. I don't mind using G2M at all when I can find really nice clothes and characters for him, and this stuff is hip and trendy.
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/?ViewProduct=115425
You stated earlier you where doing the colors procedurally so basically you'd take a surface and generate a simple gradient color map with opacity for the surface depending on the surface type. I guess though if you don't know what creating a color gradient procedurally is then I guess you either didn't say that or I misunderstood you. It looks like you are just selecting all the surfaces & changed the Surfaces assigned color to from the DAZUI color palette.
My shader pack has procedural skin and there are very clear problems because skin is heterogeneous. Buuuut... hey, if you have some wackadoodle multiarmed squid guy, it can help.
The only ones of these I have are Imari and Nyarai because they're ones that looked more authentic to me. The other ones don't really fill the bill.
Character skins made with Skin Master also don't look authentic to me. They all have an odd hue and flat appearance. I have Skin Master Pro but only used it a couple times because the skins just didn't look right. I was proably doing some wrong with it.
Okay, I've added a bit more saturation and redness. I'm aware that not all black people have light palms. That's the main reason why the palm lightening started out so subtle and why I hesitate to make my black character's palms any lighter. I want some flexibility here, so the contrast needs to be stark enough to look decent with very dark skin but not so stark that it doesn't quickly fade out of noticeability as the skin gets lighter. Nows that I think about it though, there may be a way to have the palms even lighter and retain that flexibility. It might be worth experimenting a bit.
Now, how exactly are a black person's pores different from a lighter-complexioned person's? Are they larger, more spread out, etc?
That's looking much better! I feel like the palm might be too saturated in comparison to the skin, that's all really, it's looking really nice.
Honestly, these two images are just 15 minutes work starting with Michael 8 and just the base head morphs. The first is Darius 7's map and the second is Kimo 7's map. You can see little white areas where it didn't quite line up because I haven't baked them out to Base G3M uvs yet, but they mostly fit ;). I think it makes for a very handsome guy! I tried other skins (I have about 5 total black male skins), but the others looked painted, flat and fake. Kimo and Darius were much better maps by far (Darius' unfortunate baked in facial hair notwithstanding) :).
Laurie
(BTW, he looks good without Michael too)
Here is the shaping preset for the African Head for M8....for whatever reason - even tho I checked it off - it's not loading M8's head with the morph, so, you will either have to load a clean M8 into your scene first and then apply the shaping preset or apply the shaping preset to G8M and then dial in Michael 8's head or head and body.
As I said before you will need the base morphs for this. You don't HAVE to have Michael 8 but if you don't, the settings will look like the third head on the right above.
Laurie
Hi,
I really like some of Virtual Worlds darker skinned characters. I had planned to transfer their skins onto G8--just haven't had a chance to do so yet. Their store is on sale right now:
https://www.daz3d.com/deshawn-for-genesis-3-male-and-darius-7
https://www.daz3d.com/hahana-for-kalea-7
Trish
Ok, I stand corrected you did a great job here!