Body Marked Up (Shader + Tattoo issue)
Hello again.
I have myself in an actual pickle this time: I recently got myself AoA's Subsurface Toon Shaders. I love it. I absolutely love it. Dare I say it's perfect for what I'm trying to accomplish with my character renders. :-)
However...
Most of my characters have tattoos of some kind, and the tattoo mats that I have (specifically Inked Vol. 3) don't seem to play very nice with the aforementioned Toon Shaders; when I try to apply the tattoo, I get the weird little body mask thing when the render itself comes to fruition and the tattoo is nowhere in sight. Now, if I were to use something like Slosh's Toon Girls Skin Pack (first image), everything's fine.
One gentleman over in the Commons suggested that I fiddle with the Surfaces settings a little to try and get the tattoo to show up on the character. Either I'm doing something wrong, or this simply doesn't work (second and third images) and I'll have to use the roundabout method of doing postwork in the GIMP. I'd like to avoid that if at all possible, at least as far as tattoos are concerned.
Help?
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Addendum: Incidentally, this issue shown in the second and third images also occurs if I try to put makeup on the character (e.g. eye shadow).
Again, help?
I wasn't suggesting that you try altering the settings - I was asking how they changed after applying the preset, specifically whether the shader changed, as a first step to figuring out what was happening.
Oh. Well... do the new pictures help any, if at all?
No, they still suggest the shader is being reset but I still want to be sure of that - and to know if it is happening with other shaders.
If the AoA Subsurface Toon Shader is already using the LIE to create the Toon effect I think the Tattoo LIE is not compatible. As I do not use Toon shaders I can not check to see if it is a LIE issue. Richard is correct if the Shader in use is not compatible, calls different functions, it will fail when used on other shaders.
Okay, I think I found it. I tried the HumanShaders (even the HDR shaders) and the uberShaders and the tattoo still works as it should (though it caused a skin discoloration but that's inconsequential). But if I use the Simple Skin shader in the Shader Mixer section, nothing happens.
From what I can tell, when I move on to the AoA Toon Shaders, they supersede whatever was applied directly to the skin prior (I can still add lipstick and nail polish though, but no eye shadow). So it seems that if I want tattoos to may characters, I'd either have to settle for a "traditional" skin mat or do some [probably laborious] post-work in the GIMP or something. Or I could simply not add the tattoos and call it a day, of course.
I just tried a different overlay pack and that didn't cause the issue. The names of the channels seem to match between the Age of Armor SSS shader and the standard shaders, which was my next thought. I think you need to open a support ticket on this - I don't have any of the overlay packs you are using so there's not a lot of testing I can do, now we've (I think) eliminated the easy stuff.
OK, I'm seeing the same behavior as the original poster, but I think it's because the toon shaders and Inked are designed to work in very specific ways, and they're fighting against each other. (I have Inked vol 1, not vol 3, but the principle is going to be the same.)
The toon shaders function in general as texture replacements, as opposed to the rest of the Subsurface set, which function as texture additions. If you don't hold down the Ctrl/Command key when you select the Toon Skin preset, by default, it removes all textures from the character. For some reason, that set of shaders makes the default assumption that you don't want the textures there. The other Subsurface presets used on human-type textures make the default assumption that you DO want the textures to remain. Toon Skin does seem to leave Bump and Displacement (if any) intact, so that you can have a skin-like appearance.
So. You use the toon skin presets, it colors the figure the way you'd like, but there is Absolutely Nothing in the Diffuse channel.
You then use Inked. (It has to come after the Toon Skin preset, or the preset wipes it out anyway as part of the texture replacement.) Inked is designed to operate as an overlay on the diffuse channel. It also contains an opacity map that makes the non-tattoo parts of the diffuse texture visible. However, you have used Toon Skin, and there are now NO diffuse textures. Therefore, the opacity map reveals the bare Genesis mesh underneath, tinted however Toon Skin has done.
In order to use both Toon Skin and Inked together, you need to do the following:
1. Apply your base texture to the figure.
2. In the surfaces tab, select the desired surfaces to which you wish to apply the shader. You may or may not want to exclude the mouth and eye surfaces for the moment; your choice.
3. Hold down the Ctrl/Command key (depending on whether you're on Windows/Mac) and double click the desired Toon Skin preset. A popup will appear. Unusually, the options will not be what they normally are.
4. In the resulting popup that reads "Material Preset Load Options", switch the "Surfaces" option to SELECTED and the "Images" option to IGNORE (see image below for example). Then click OK. This will activate the Subsurface shader's Toon Skin options.
5. Wait. Play the Jeopardy theme or something. This will take a minute or two.
6. After a minute, the Toon Skin preset will have applied, and the skin will look more or less as you want ... but possibly with fracture lines appearing where the surface material zones are. For some reason, the Toon Skin presets automatically flip to Victoria 4. (This IS in fact a bug and should be fixed.) You'll need to scroll down through the settings on the Surfaces tab to find the UV and switch it from Victoria 4 to whatever it should be.
7. Go to the Inked directory. Pick the desired preset and double click. It will apply, and you will see the desired tattoo in the desired area.
Congrats! You will now have an Entirely Different Problem!
To achieve the toon look, Subsurface is so strong that it completely washes out the Inked tattoo. If you turn down Subsurface, you lose at least some of that Toon look. That's not a bug in either product; it's simply a byproduct of the fact that there's no way to set Inked strong enough to fight the strength of Subsurface Toon Skin.
Hope this is helpful.
EDIT: One thing to note is that Inked is designed to work only with the Genesis 2 Basic Female/Victoria 5 UV set. (They're more or less the same thing.) Therefore, the back tattoos will not work properly on any other UV set. You'll have a misaligned split on the back where the seam comes together. All of the other tattoos should work more or less as expected.
Thanks, I was using plain AoA SSS thinking any issue would have to be general, but of course it wasn't here.
You could also try flipping the Pre SSS - Post SSS setting, but again that would probably de-toon the result.
Glad to be of service!
I did notice that the Toon Skin shader set the diffuse strength to 50%, so I tried increasing it to 100% without touching the actual subsurface setting. (It does get rather confusing talking about the subsurface setting in the Subsurface shader sometimes.) It didn't help Inked much (see below). Also, Bree is perhaps not the best texture to toonify, since she looks rather ... odd.
Oh, SageRuffin mentioned issues with makeup and that Slosh's Toon Girls pack seems to work just fine. To take those in reverse order: the Toon Girls pack works because it actually does have textures, tuned specifically to work with Subsurface -- the shaders have already been applied to achieve that particular toony look. Makeup depends on how and when it's applied. If you apply the makeup for the texture set after you've applied the toon shader as you did before, it will look strange because either the face is the only section with an actual texture (and it won't have the toon shader in that case), or because, again, you'll be applying LIE presets that will have opacity masks designed to make certain that a texture that is no longer there is visible.
Necro post, but I was looking for similar thing:
How do I get Eye shadow on an AOA Toon Character?
I was able to do it, I believe. I had SV Artistique Vol. 01, and was going to try those eye shaders. The actual textures are on a white background, so I added them to the diffuse and subsurface color channels of the 1_SkinFace (using V4 in this case)
I had to darken the diffuse by half, and increase it from 50% to 100%
Here is the result for one of the shaders :)