Quote - Don't bother making a separate material zone for lips. Any lipstick or gloss effect should be driven by a mask. When you assign the lips a different material and don't use a mask with soft anti-aliased edges, any lipstick effect looks fake. It's important to blend the lips with the face. So in my VSS shader, I design the face shader as one thing and I never put a different shader on the lips.

Bagginsbill: With all due respect [because you're the god of Poser shaders], I disagree. Yes, in Poser you can use masking to change lipstick, eyeshadow, etcetera, however in DAZ|Studio, such a thing is impossible. And it really brings down the number of textures files required for makeup if you can put green makeup on one face map, red makeup on another, then just switch the face or lips textures in order to get a girl with red lips and green eyeshadow. Otherwise you have to make four texture maps in order to deal with all combinations, and when you add another color  it goes up to nine, another color and it goes up to sixteen...

Of course the same shader setup should be used for the entire face. However, you can easily use the same shader on both material zones. The problem with having the lips separate from the face really isn't because of that, it's because whoever creates the material zones always puts the edge right at the edge of the lips. Then texture makers can't make textures with appropriately soft edges that can be switched out without hard lines, unless they make the edges of the lipstick well within the edges of the lips, which looks just as unnatural as hard edges at times. Or, people try to make "lipstick" just by changing the diffuse color, which is pretty horrible for a realistic effect as well.

However, if the "lips" material zone extended slightly past the actual edges of the lips, that would solve all these problems. You could still use the same shader setup on both the face and the lips, and the diffuse texture could be switched out to another lips color without the edge blending issues.

If I've been horribly confusing I apologize. [Also, I will resort to awful diagrams in an attempt to explain myself properly if neccesary. XD]

EDIT: I also have to disagree about separating the pupil from the iris. It's incredibly useful in D|S to be able to remove the specularity and sometime the diffuse color from just the pupil easily.

Odf, Antonia looks absolutely incredible so far. If you don't have anyone lined up yet, I'd love to do some shaping morphs for her once you get the preliminary stuff finalized.

My Gallery - critiques desperately needed welcome!