As you've maybe noticed, people with dark skin generally have obviously paler skin on their palms and on the soles of their feet. While it's quite easy to adjust the tone of a texture by changing the base colour in the Materials room, perhaps giving a hint of suntan to a pale skin, this doesn't have you a realistic difference for the palms. And some dark-skin textures don't bother with it. Which can seem wrong. If you have a texture that gives you the variation you want, whether palms or tan lines, why not use it to control the variation with another texture? The picture shows two V3 textures in use. The "African" texture is for a character called "Desiree"--I don't recall where is came from--which has the pale palms. The foreground "Drow Elf" started out as a very plain blue-grey texture. (Continued)

Here we have the Material Room settings. You can see how the original Drow texturemap has a pretty unvaried tone over the hands and feet. As loaded from the MAT file, it also had a very dark base for the diffuse colour, and picked up the colour of the skin from the Specular effects. The setup is pretty simple. The math_function converts the African texture to a greyscale, and the value_1 dial is adjusted to tweak the result. Mixing it with the blue texturemap is done with a color_math node: there may be other ways of doing this, but I used the Bias function. Yes, the result looks darker. This is compensated for by the more conventional arrangement of the inputs, so that most of the skin colouring now comes from the Diffuse input. *Star Trek* geeks, and perhaps those who remember some of the early D&D stuff, will recall the opportunities there might be for green-skinned slave girls.

That's clever. I'm saving your idea for when I need it - I can only hope that when I do need it, I remember that I have it saved. The general principle could probably be used for other material room effects; now I just need the time to experiment... Thanks!

What the modelers who make the figures really ought to do is to make the palms and
soles a separate material zone.  In the DAZ figures, V3, M3, YT, David, Steph, etc.
the whole hand and foot is a separate material zone, as in the fingernails and toenails.
If they were thinking they also should have created a palms and soles material zone.
Anybody looked into the idea of using the grouping tool to create separate material
zones for the palms and soles? Then you wouldn't have to mess with the materials
for all of the different body parts to get them to match the hands and feet.
Like I noticed in your example you were showing the setting for the nipples.
This way you could save the character with the new palm and sole material
zones and then when you want to apply a skin texture, you just apply it to the
whole body at once with a mat pose, and then you only have to tweak the palm
and sole material setting.

Would be great to have separate zones for this. I ended up Photoshopping fairer palms onto a texture map with brown skin.

Some people are inclined to rant about too many Materials--I've seen them get all snotty about Aiko 3 and her legs. (Personally, I think that DAZ 3D are crap at writing useful readme files.) Aiko 3 is, I think, reasonably balanced, with the zoning of legs and arms. Likewise, the use of zones for lips and nostrils. The problem is that the underlying mesh has to be in the right place for the zone boundary. Look at all the character textures which have multiple full-head maps to give different make-up styles. You could, instead, have a single full-head map with the normal skin tonex, a control map showing where the makeup went, and the makeup colours done by shaders. I think it would be possible to extract three different control signals from a single full-colour image, using Component math_nodes, but that might be seen as being clever for the sake of being clever.

Now that's an approach I'd never have thought of!
But now it's been aired, I can see lots of applications and variations...

Many thanks AntoniaTiger:-))

PS - Having separate matererial zones for the palms (and soles of feet) would be a PITA for me, 'cos it'd be more trouble than its worth trying to bet the blend right between the zones. It's bad enough as it is...
And as for using the grouping tool, you'd just end up with a distinct seam where the two colours joined.

Cheers,
Diolma

Brilliant idea.  The dark palms on most "ethnic" textures really bugs me.  Never thought of this solution, but I like it.

Never knew it bothered anybody else, thought that was just me. For now, I'm stuck Photoshopping a lighter pair onto the texture with the darker skin;  but once it's done the first time, I have that for future uses.

I have never seen, as a matter of fact, brown palms in my entire life. Unless they were really dirty. lol

Just a (probably not very useful) thought....
With AntoniaTiger's existing setup, you could change the math node (the bottom Left one) to subtract, switch the texture to the 2nd input (with a relevant value, to be decided by experiment), and change the 1st value to 1. That would invert the image (like a negative). The result would have the opposite effect, lightening the rest of the texture and darkening the bright bits...

Might be useful in getting rid of unwanted "built-in" highlights, tho..
Or for exotic Sci-Fi effects..

Cheers,
Diolma

Thanks a lot for that, diolma. I'm really going to have to go through what AntoniaTiger said carefully, because I've never done anything like this before. I always avoided fiddling with the math node before. ;) This is really cool information.

Small sneaky trick. Set up a single sided square. Scale it, and position the camera square on and aimed at the centre. Make a copy of the Material, and apply it to the square. Now you can render a modified copy of the texture, with a suitable render size. You might have to do some careful cropping. In this case, it saves you the memory used by one of the texturemaps.

Re: small sneaky trick...

Use the "front" camera to make sure everything's "square on". Make the ground invisible, and all shadows off.

Also, set the square's size to the same (relative) dimensions as the original texture's (IE, keep the same aspect ratio).  If the texture is square (most of them are), then all you need to do is use the main "scale" dial on the square.

And, if it's possible, reset the render dimensions to exactly the same ratio, then zoom the front camera in til the texture fills (but doesn't overflow) the square...

Just trying to make life easier..:-))

Cheers,
Diolma
(Antonia, feel free to slap me if you think I'm butting in where I shouldn't...I'll quickly shut up, with absolutely no hard feelings..)

If anyone is looking for a V3 dark-skinned character with paler palms, check on Pem for V3 at PoserPros. It's in their Freebie list, if you have any picks spare after the last run of that offer.

Pem for V3

by dolfijntjes
$6.45 / €5.09

Not exactly a freebie by my estimation. Nice product though!

It's a sales promotion Poser Pros do from time to time. They have a pretty long list of items you can have for free, one for every item you buy while the offer is running. But you don't have to make your selection until later. I've still a couple of picks left. There's some very good stuff in that list. You might not be seeing it's there if you're not registered and logged in.

I'm registered and logged in and I even placed it in my cart. No Freebie in sight. Must be for "Special" people.

Go to the Store page. Look at the righthand side of the screen, below the PoserPros banner and menu. There are four links, "View Cart" at the top, followed by purchase, wishlist, and freebies. If you have qualified for any freebies, you pick them, and download them, from that "My Freebies" page, not by going through the normal purchase system.

Hmmm - unless they have different freebies available for different people, this isn't one of them.  I still have a few freebies coming from Poser Pros, and Pem's not among them

That's brilliant.  I can do basic things in the Mat Room, but have no idea about using different nodes in conjunction with each other to achieve these types of effects.

Thank you for posting this. I've saved the tutorial and will try this out myself next time I'm in poser.

It has also just occurred to me that, for those who are competent using 2D apps, you could probably get the same effect by layering two different textures together, with a little careful use of the erase brush...
Cheers,
Diolma

Quote - It has also just occurred to me that, for those who are competent using 2D apps, you could probably get the same effect by layering two different textures together, with a little careful use of the erase brush...
Cheers,
Diolma

Or make a mask that can be used to drive a Blender node in the material room.