Shader Effects Colour Guide for different skin tones?

Zev0

Anybody know where I can find this? I use interjection and Ubershader 2, but I'm sure on dark skinned textures the SSS colour is not a bright orange or red. Is there a guideline to what tones to use? Same with Velvet etc...I find sometimes something is always off but there is too many channels to go through. A basic guide of what colour tones to use for each skin type would be great. Eg for black skin types, use this colour for velvet, this for SSS, this for diffuse etc....Same for yellow skin types or pale. Somebody make a chart:) Also fall off values etc...:)

kaalika.gg

Would love this too, just getting started and it's all so confusing!

TheNathanParable

Why not try Adobe Kuler? It's a palette creator.
https://kuler.adobe.com/

Click on "Create". The default settings will be "From Colour" and "Analogous". As you change the base colour (whether it's be inputting numbers or by dragging the circle), the other colours will change to suit. Setting it to a skintone will give you a couple of extra shades to both the left (more yellow) and right (more red). This might help give you a good idea as to what colours to use.

For example, if I set the base colour to a dark brown flesh tone (#291D16), it gives me #40301F on the far left and #361C1A on the far right. Try using those colours and seeing how it works out.

Zev0

I think it is a bit more complicated than that. To get the right colours we must understand the properties of skin. So if I add a specific skin tone, I need to know what the Subsurface scatter colour will be and at what strength. Or what the velvet colour in relation to that specific tone would be. I don't think that app can calculate that.

Szark

That's it Zev0. Light penatrates the skin and some of that light is asborbed which for light skin this is normally on the yellow side.The light that is not absorbed bounces back out red due to the blood vessels. With white skin we see these effects more than darker skins.

Interesting question.

vwrangler

There was a brief discussion on this when Interjection first came out. Some people were noticing that darker skinned textures were coming out surprisingly red.

For Interjection, the solution seems to be tinkering with SSS and Translucency shades in the brown and yellow range.

forumarchive.daz3d.com: Slimer_J_Spud: in "Interjection Released" thread
Posted:Mon Dec 05, 2011 10:13 am
I think I finally got a nice render using Interjections. The video tutorial set me straight. My issue was with the pink tone on dark skin, and perhaps thanks to discussing that here, the tutorial included a sample setting with the Rob texture. I'm using Marie, and the render looks nice! I only used 2 distant lights, both with raytraced shadows.

FYI, here are my skin settings for Marie elite: Diffuse strength 100%, Diffuse color 170,170,170, Ambient off, and the all-important Subsurface color, 200,212,72. The Subsurface color is more of a bronze than the salmon pink Interjections uses by default. That's the big thing I was missing. My test renders were done without the hair, and only took about 8 or 9 minutes. The hair made it about 2.5 hrs. The Interjections set is V4 middle, with eye setting K.

Image of Marie Elite with Interjection applied (Expression Engine won't let us embed images from external sites at the current time, so a link's all I could do.)

(Revisiting that thread was surprisingly useful, at this late date; I just realized that one of my characters gets blown out in Interjection because her specular maps either don't exist or are in the wrong place. Since using Ubersurface on her makes her look like she's got the worst case of dry skin you've ever seen, that's helpful to know. But I digress.)

Interjection requires at least one light in the scene to have raytraced shadows, and preferably all of them.

For Ubersurface, what I've done is to take settings for darker skinned characters that use HSS and then upgrade them with the UberSurface2 Base Upgrade preset, using CTRL to make sure that textures are ignored, and that it just adds the extra options. (HSS/EHSS is a subset of Ubersurface, more or less.) You pick a body area, remove all the textures from it, then save that section as a shader. Then you can tinker with the settings colors, using those to start. The ones I have using HSS are Chablis, Rob Elite, Lee Elite, Marie Elite, and also Natasha, although I haven't done anything with her as yet. Again, most of the tinkering is in the yellow/brown range -- though I think Lee's SSS and translucency are white, if I remember correctly; I don't know if that was intentional or if he just doesn't have the right settings applied.

Also, apart from Interjection, the only other character's I've found with SSS maps (which you should use with SSS and Translucency to tell it where and how strong to apply) are the ones from JSGraphics/Male-M3dia/ForbiddenWhispers. Other people probably produce them, of course; I just don't have those characters.

Hope this is helpful.

mjc1016

I think what you are looking for was a Siggraph paper...2006 or so

http://graphics.ucsd.edu/papers/egsr2006skin/egsr2006skin.pdf <=that one, maybe?</p>

I've got more links around, but I'm not finding relevant material...

That discusses the 'science' involved in skin coloring...and from that it should be possible to derive the needed info for Interjection.

But, basically, bellow the surface we are all the same color. Unless you've got green blood or something. It's the top layers/surface that influence the color/skin tone. And SSS is more concerned with what's below the surface than the surface layers.

Velvet color should be more based on hair color than skin color...it's supposed to mimic the fine hairs on the skin's surface, so that's what to keep in mind for that...and I'm not talking about the more visible, larger hairs...but the soft, downy, close to the skin ones...which on most people are very light colored, but often, if held up to a pure white background will have some color to them.