Skin Tone - How to Lighten Victoria 7's Tanned Skin

tristanthorne1997

When I load the Indigo and Rayn Gen3F Actors into my scene and then apply "Victoria MAT" (Iray) to both of their Skin surfaces, they seem extremely dark.....very suntanned. What settings would I adjust to lighten their skin color? There are soooo many dials in the Surfaces Editor, I don't know where to begin.

tristanthorne1997

Started with Teen Josie and Rayn this time, and still got really tanned skin. Is there a good tutorial anyone would recommend on how to change skin color? 

andya_b341b7c5f5

I'm no expert but since no-one else has offered yet...Someone with more ideas may come along later but...

LIghtening is more difficult than darkening.  Aside from tweaking the lighting (your image looks quite dark to me - indirect light only?) you could use the Layered Image Editor (LIE) in DS on the diffuse image textures to add a white layer with low opacity, but this is obviously uniform and will lighten everything including lips.

You have more control in an image editor, where you can similarly add a largely transparent white layer, but here you could use a layer mask and vary the amount of lightening applied to different parts of the textures.

Maybe you have another character with a set of diffuse textures for the same UV set that are paler?  You could substitute them.

Tottallou

You can also lighten the skin by reducing Translucency -

Josie loads at 0.65 - Under her Materials there is a preset for 0.45 which lightens her a bit more but you can change that to even lower

Attached is Josie as she loads & with 0.10 translucency (Iray with just the HDR that loads at start up)

 

 

tristanthorne1997

Thank you to both of you. I will try these techniques tonight. Do you know if something like this product would work for lightening skin? Is it truely a one-click solution? 

 

http://www.daz3d.com/beautiful-skin-iray-genesis-3-female-s

Tottallou

I have this product & it is very good & has a number of presets for different skin tones - For Josie you would need to use the "Without Image Maps" version

 

tristanthorne1997

Thank you again, Tottallou!

tristanthorne1997

Tottallou, This works well to lighten the skin color. But when I add Genitalia to a character that has associated Mats, like Victoria 7, the Gens don't match the rest of the skin, even though I set the translucency the same in both the body skin and the Gen skin. Any suggestions?

Tottallou

I had not used the genital prop but I tried it on V7 - Loaded V7 then added the prop & used the props own texture & changed translucency on both which seemed to work without any really obvious mismatch

You could try adding the materials again to both V7 & the prop (under genesis 3 - female - materials - iray )

Perhaps someone who uses the genital prop on a regular basis will chime in with a better answer since we can't add images to show our results

 

 

 

Novica

Tottallou said:

I have this product & it is very good & has a number of presets for different skin tones - For Josie you would need to use the "Without Image Maps" version

 

That's good to know, I had bought it but not fiddled with it yet.  And I like the .10 translucency, it lightened her up nicely.

fred9803

tristanthorne1997 said:

Tottallou, This works well to lighten the skin color. But when I add Genitalia to a character that has associated Mats, like Victoria 7, the Gens don't match the rest of the skin, even though I set the translucency the same in both the body skin and the Gen skin. Any suggestions?

I think you need this NGV7. "When user starts new gens for V7, it will automatically match the character's UV, and then automatically use corresponding templates and character skin textures to generate required textures."

rsharp

As I typically retouch all renders in Photoshop, I use the following method to lighten skin (I learned it from a professional retoucher):

1. Add a black layer with mode set to 'Hue', mask things out to just apply it to the skin.  This will ultimately desaturate the skin, so adjust transparency of the layer as desired.
2. Add a white layer with mode set to 'Screen'.  Duplicate your black layer's mask here for a start.  Further refine the mask though to gradually omit shadowed areas.  This will ultimately lighten the skin.  Also adjust transparency of the layer as desired.
3. Add a curves adjustment layer; boost highlights and deepen shadows (S-curve) to bring back contrast.

The following images show a 3-light setup with Victoria 7.   First is the original image as output by Daz3D.  The second shows the above post work.  In this particular example, my black layer was at 20% and white layer at 15%.