I see many of even the tattoed skin textures in RMP seem as though the tattoo is a stick on decal tatto... how best do we get the look of ink under skin? A little blur... color burn?

You started me thinking and I think this would be a great question to ask bagginsbill**.
**I'm sure you could get very realistic tattoos using a texture plugged into a shader node - some transluency and blur/noise to give "under the skin" appearance.
Just a thought.

The answer depends on whether or not you have a layer mask for the tattoo. If you don't have a layer mask, then the answer depends on whether the tattoo layer has a unique color for the "not tattoo" parts, such as black or white.

Also, as ashley9803 suggests, I can do it with nodes instead of Photoshop. I like the node approach because:

1. I can skip all that workflow associated with switching between Photoshop and Poser, saving the image and doing test renders. The material room preview will show me exactly what I'm going to get.
2. I can size, position, and rotate the tattoo in shaders.
3. I can easily layer many tatoos in the shader, giving more options for combinations.

How do you want to proceed? What's your scenario?

Once again, you prove why you're up for Godhood, bagginsbill!  Is there a tutorial in the process here for those of us who are node illiterate?

As far as doing it with nodes, I would have just a tattoo image and a mask of it to work with. The idea is to place it to look under the skin so to speak. I would prefer a monochrome to a color if it made it easier to have it look in the skin as opposed to on the skin.

But "on the skin brings up an other issue... I once was able to make grease paint, such as a white clown face, that did look on the skin as opposed to the skin simply changed in color, but now I can't recreate the effect, I can't rember how I got the look of opaque white over my texture but retaing the texture look not just with a bump map but on the texture image as well.

But have a look at this. Is the effect what you're looking for? This is V4 with a butterfly image blended in with nodes. Of course your tattoo can be any image. The technique I'll show you involves having a color map and a transparency map for the tattoo. Or it will also work if you just have a stencil and no color - we can do the color in the nodes too.

Brand new tattoo's tend to have the 'on skin' look, and the ones that have healed up look like they sunk in a bit.

For the healed tattoo In photoshop, I would probably try to sandwich the tattoo image between two skin layers, the top one being rather transparent, and play with some more blending, blurring and transparency options.

You may be able to do similar in Poser using shader nodes, and blend them at different intensities, little diffusion, little bit of a bump coming from both, the skin and the tatoo (for the fresh tatto look)

I think I am more likely to go with a stencil since that might look more imbeded in the skin. What you have here looks pretty go though still a bit stick-on. I wonder how it would be possible to get more of the skin variaton added to the tattoo so there appeared to be skin over it? In photoshop there is the buisness of soft light and hard light which give the feeling of either being blended under or over the base... both do unwanted color shifts though. I wonder if a crude simulation of skin over the tatto could be obtained by blending a granite node with the stencil before blending it to the skin... noise like that can fool the eye even if it is not a true match to the surrounding area. Maybe some sort of edge blender on the tattoo before it is blended to the skin... would that make any sense? The ink would look deeper under the skin on the oblique angle?  But if this is to be something I can do it must not be too complicated... I have unreasonable trouble understanding Poser math nodes. Thank you for your interest.

Connie, that is good obvious advise! I had not thought to just put the skin over the tattoo rather than vis versa! Here I am spinning my wheels with layer style tricks! Man, I get trapped with ways of thinking about a problem and then someone can through fresh air on the situation with a simple comment! I'll have to see how it works :)

:)  Glad to be of help!  
For me it always helps to bounce ideas off of someone... often it opens up all new horizons! (darn things hiding in plain sight too)

..

I went to look for tattoo images online, to see their characteristics... this website has some pretty decent size pics:
http://www.ratemyink.com/?action=ssp&pid=28050&cat=1

What I'm noticing a lot with more modern tatoos is that the colors are still vibrant and not very blurred, but skin pores and their mild bumps are still visible, along with a tad of the darker pore discoloration. Especially through lighter colors.

The specularity and shine is that of the skin, it's not changed by tattoo's presence.
The older the tattoo, the softer (blurrier) the lines, and the more color shifting it has. Probably has to do with quality too. :)

You may also want to use this link for references (sorry, that is the name of the online mag!):

http://www.prickmag.net/tattoos.html

There is also Tattoo magazine which you can get at your local bookstore, Hot Topic, Spencer's, or tattoo shop.

How does this look?

I'm just grabbing images from the web looking for clipart that sort of looks like a tattoo. Part of the problem I have is that real tattoo artists use more gradients than this.

I think two other things which increase realism are some slight blurring, presumably due to colour bleed, and old tats especially seem to go sort of blurred round the edges of any block of colour;  and secondly the imperfections inherent in the process. I don't suppose live skin is particularly easy to colour, there are bound to be small areas of less pigment, some areas which the tattooist never coloured at all, and so on. A problem with using clip art, especially if created originally in a vector package, is that it looks too perfect for a real tattoo.

How does this look?

It looks great. I think the only detail though is that the tattos I see at least are shadded with a stippling technique. I think that it should be possible to get stippling by doing a conversion in photoshop. Convert to B&W using an adaptive diffusion pattern and apply as a luminosity level. Maybe just the grain filter will do on the other hand.

Since tattoo ink is deposited into the dermis layer (below the epidermis), one can say that it is actually below the skin - but actually just below the first skin layer.  This is only about 1mm below the surface so for most 3D CG it would probably be a bit too much to attempt that level of detail.

But if you are looking for 'truly authentic and realistic' at close range, then an overlay of the skin texture with a particular amount of transparency should do nicely.  Not sure how all of this would affect sub-surface scattering (as tattoos are sub-surface).  As noted, 'surface' irregularities in the skin are still present (bumps, wrinkles, pores).

At any distance from the skin, getting too complex would be overkill.  Follow bagginsbills method and you'll be okay.  But definitely consider references and the age of the tattoo.

well you got me hooked, how is this done with shaders??????

I'll show you - gonna take me a little while to prepare screen shots for the tutorial. 

It amuses me that everyone is suggesting some form of blending/partial transparency of the tattoo image with the skin image, and that is precisely what I'm doing. Perhaps you want a greater fraction of skin in the blend. No matter - I leave the artistic choices to you. But straight blending alone with a low fraction on the tattoo simply makes a faded stained look. You lose a lot of the tattoo color and darkness that way. I'm using a couple extra nodes to keep almost all the variation in skin color overlayed witht the tattoo color. But the skin I'm using doesn't have much variation to begin with, so there isn't a lot to preserve. Maybe you want me to actually increase the skin color variations somewhat. I'll show you how. It's really easy.

Woohoo!!  BB is up early!!!

Bookmark!

While we're at it-anyone know of a good way to do a full back tatoo without distorting the texture 
or wrecking it with seams? shaders would be really cool, but a method to paint it on the texture 
would work also......trying to recreate a friend for a birthday present-and having nothing but 
trouble:)

When I say transparency, I mean a a very small bit of the skin color map (since the tattoo does lie about 1mm below the surface) and more from the specular and bump maps since these features are truly above the tattoo.I definitely agree here that blending with the tattoo at a low value thereof is incorrect.  The epidermal layer is very translucent and the coloration stills shows vibrantly in a relatively new tattoo and doesn't fade extensively with age (all things considered of course).

Kuro - I had blended 60% of the skin and 40% of the tattoo color and the skin variation barely shows up. And I made no change to the specular. Again, specular is obvious against bright skin, not so obvious against dark tatoo. The issue is the skin variations or specular effects are TINY and only noticeable when the overall brightness is high. Consider the variation between RED 200 and 220 - its clearly visible. But put a black or other dark color tattoo there, and then the difference between 30 and 50 is almost invisible. Now consider that when blending at, say 50%, the variation is cut in half, so it is only 30 to 40. You can't see that except on really expensive monitors.

First, open the skin shader for where you want the tattoo. I'm using the hip.

I'm using V4 because it is pretty complicated, so you'll see how to handle this case.

Track down where the color map is going. In the V4 shader, it goes to two places. I opened the node so you can see where it goes.

Connect the first to your U_Scale and V_Scale. This will control your overall tattoo scale. I adjusted the value to 8% of the original size.

Set U_Offset = 1 and connect to the second math function. This is your horizontal position. I used .21 to move my butterfly over the right buttock.

Set V_Offset = 1 and connect to the third math function. This is your vertical position. I used .26 to move it to the hip.

Set the Image_Mapped = None so the mask does not repeat.

Set the Background = BLACK so the rest of the mask is black.

Connect the mask to the Blender:Blending input. Put a dark color in Input_2 of the Blender. Render. You should see the tattoo mask on your figure. For monochrome tattoos, this is all you need to do.

Change the Blender:Input_2 to white, and connect to the tattoo color map. Render. You should see a faded copy of your tattoo.

You can play with these two things. Try even lower Blending, and higher Texture_Strength. You can make the skin variations more or less visible this way.

So I opened up the Blinn node, which is where the specular is being made. I insert a Math Function:Add with Value_2 connected to my tattoo mask. Then I kept increasing the Value_2 until at 10 it looked like I had a lot more specular, BUT ONLY ON THE TATTOO.

This lets you make the tattoo shinier than the skin, as you like. In this case, the tattoo is 11 times shinier (1 + 10) than the skin.

I also found that the Bump amount on this shader was really low - perhaps too low. I raised it to .04 instead of .02. This made the skin bumples much more visible. You would have to do this to all skin zones to match. Or, you could do math functions to only increase the bump over the tattoo. If you want to see that, ask.

10/17/07

Renee1234:

*"While we're at it-anyone know of a good way to do a full back tatoo without distorting the texture or wrecking it with seams? shaders would be really cool, but a method to paint it on the texture would work also......trying to recreate a friend for a birthday present-and having nothing but trouble:)"

I just found this application while looking through Renderosity Software for something else and I remembered your question. It may let you apply a tatoo across the entire back.

DecalMaster, current price in US dollars - $31.45
 http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=59686

LMK

If you have this problem, just decrease that specular multiplier for the tattoo.

The effect looks great there, bill. I would suggest that the reason people arent' completely convinced by it is that it's not a great tattoo in and of itself - which is not your fault, since you were just using a simple image as a demonstration. 

I do wonder if the specular is a little high on the finished result - it reminds me more of those kiddie tattoos that you put on with water, rather than the 'proper' adult ones. Still, that could just be personal taste. Great work on working this one out for us!

JonTheCelt

@Renee:

Blacksmith 3D Paint can do what you want, and the basic version is free. Here I opened up V3, and clicked my butterfly onto her back. Look on the right side at the resulting color map. You can see that the program took the image apart for me and rotated and scaled the butterfly in two pieces to make it work out seamlessly. You can do this across material zones, too, like head/neck/torso.

The program is a little tricky to learn, but very powerful. The free version will not do above 1K by 1K on a color map, though. For really high-res work, and also to enable all the tools, you should buy it.

Quote - 10/17/07

Renee1234:

*"While we're at it-anyone know of a good way to do a full back tatoo without distorting the texture or wrecking it with seams? shaders would be really cool, but a method to paint it on the texture would work also......trying to recreate a friend for a birthday present-and having nothing but trouble:)"

I just found this application while looking through Renderosity Software for something else and I remembered your question. It may let you apply a tatoo across the entire back.

DecalMaster, current price in US dollars - $31.45
 http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=59686

LMK

Thanks!

Few food for thought type critical comments on the last image from the first page of comments :)

It's looking great, and much closer. Still a little bit of a stick-on look to it.
I wonder if there's a way to sink it in, and leave a very transparent film of skin under it. Perhaps a soft edged bump mask... Something that would create that 'floating under a thin layer of almost transparent skin' look. The outer edges need blurring :)

The specularity of the black and colored in areas on the highlight shouldn't be more then that of the skin around it. I think having it different contributes to the shiny stick on look in the tatoo area only.

I have to agree with Conniekat8 here.  New tattoos (very new - as in a few days old) look just like they were painted on the skin.  This is due to two reasons: ink still persists in the epidermis and the skin is still 'wounded'.  Skin is replaced over time. Any residual ink in the epidermis will be removed by healing and this process.

But older tattoos are below the skin.  I think that the image at the end of the first page is the best of the lot so far.  Again, depending upon how accurate the representation is to be, it is best to study real tattoos from a variety of sources - a real person would be optimal.  Tattoos are definitely not sharp edged.  They may appear that way in photographs - but there is a bleeding of the ink under the skin.  So maybe a blur node would be called for (seeing that there is none I'm not sure what the analog would be).

WoW! Thanks.

I think the #1 reason you don't believe my butterfly is because it is a photo of a butterfly, or a very photorealistic drawing.

I can't find a single legit tattoo color map and mask anywhere, and I can't draw to save my life.

If you have a properly drawn properly styled image, it will look vastly different, especially if the transparency mask is a gradient instead of all or nothing like I'm using.

OMG Bill this is A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. Your skills are endless!

The last butterfly tattoo looks more like a tattoo. yes, the image choice has something to do with it as well, but I think you have the skin overlay pretty close in the last butterfly. :)  It has that slightly blended slightly muted look that healed tatto's get :)
The girls are looking a lot more like tattoo's as well.

I'd look for some tribal or celtic weave or ornament for the testing. Might be a bit easier to get the right under the skin look witha a single color/tone image :)  HTH!

You may be able to grab an experimental image from here: http://www.daytonsigns.com/dayton_signs_097.htm

Yes - well - you know - "girls only want boyfriends who have great skills."

Quote - Yes - well - you know - "girls only want boyfriends who have great skills."

heehee very true...