Harmonize skin shaders?

Seven193

Let's say I have two Genesis 8 characters, which are from different vendors that tend to use their own skin shader settings, so when placed under the same lighting, there's a noticeable inconsistency of gloss and color.  One skin might look dry, while the other has more wetness, or one skin might look natural, while the other might look more red, orange, or yellow.

Are there any simple tweaks I can do to make the two skins more consistent, in terms of gloss and color, without changing the texture maps of course?  Nothing drastic, just simple changes. Thanks.

margrave

Just copy the skin settings from one figure to the other.

You do it by ctrl-clicking the material and choosing to keep the texture maps.

Seven193

Too drastic. I want to tweak their settings only.

I don't suppose there is a script that can blend the skin settings of two shaders by a percentage?

Not all settings have to blended, just a few that deal specifically with gloss and color.  Geomety-related settings (normal, bump, displacement, etc..) can be ignored, and anything else that doesn't affect color.

margrave

Dunno about a script. I believe the Shader Mixer allows you to group nodes together, so in theory you could save both skin shaders as their own groups and blend them with a mix node. Haven't tried it, though.

Seven193

I haven't used the Daz Studio Shader Mixer before.  I tried loading a Uber shader material from the scene, and about 50 nodes popped.  Holy Moley.  Way too complicated for simple tweaking.

 

Richard Haseltine

The default Iray shader is everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, if you want to use Shader Mixer to create a custom shader you are presumably interested only in a limited section of that (e.g. to add image layers to a property) or in a more specific set of features, which should be less complex.

Seven193

Right now, I'm just tweaking two parameters, Translucency Weight and Glossy Layered Weight.  Reducing Translucency Weight helps lighten the skin if it's too dark, and increasing Glossy Layered Weight gives the skin some wetness if it looks too dry. If these two settings are consistent across all characters, then I think they start to look better under the same lighting.