Glad you all find this interesting.

Face_Off - Lost your fabulous detailed response did you? I've done that too. That's why I now prepare what I'm going to say in textpad away from the browser. THEN I refresh the page and paste in my reply. There is some kind of timeout on rendo that prevents replying more than some amount of time after you read the post.

Anyways... I understand that you think the colorramp should not add red to middle - should add red to shadows right? But remember my experiment with "microscopic" skin model a week ago or so? There was MORE red in the middle, not less, according to that model. Is it realistic? Not sure. But lots of ppl are responding to that skin so I think its at least some kind of improvemnt.

Now I noticed a while ago that all your shaders were heavy on the red in the shadows and edges. In particular, in all your pics, the deepest shadows are never "gray", they are clearly red. I added that to my shader a different way. The edge_blend_3 - see that pink on outer_color? That DARKENS the edges to be more red like your shaders. Frankly, I've been carefully studying lots of people in real life and lots of photos - I think the "red shift" of shadows is an artifact of FILM AND LIGHTS, not real life. I have never seen a real person whose "dark side" was red shifted. But film seems to do that and that's what we are used to seeing.

That's my theory - what do you think?

Also, please try my shader with the red color ramp turned off (i.e. set the color_math addere value_2 to black). Do two figures in same light like I've done here. Tell me what you think. I think the red shift up for surfaces TOWARD camera and red shift DOWN for surfaces AWAY from camera is producing more realism that either alone.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)