Sounds like you want to be using a different material for the lips and nails.

VSS is about copying a set of shaders onto multiple materials zones on your target figure. You do not have to use my shaders - you can put any shaders you want in the Template material zones.

The trick here is that VSS, by default, is applying the Template Skin shader to skin, lip, nails - everything except eye and inner mouth parts. This means that the material applied to the lip, nails, and other skin areas is identical. They will only differ in which texture maps are used.

If you want fingernails that are using a different shader, then you have to change things in the VSS control prop.

You want to create a new material in the VSS control prop for the nails. Then you want to put a nice glossy nail shader in there. One you might want to try is from my free Orb shader set. You'd also want to change the "Shader Rules" in the control prop so it knows you do not want to copy Template Skin to the fingernails. So you'd create a new material zone, like Template Nails. You'd add a Shader Rule node to Copy Template Nails. And you'd wire up the Rule fingernail or whatever to connect it to Copy Template Nails.

I think this was discussed in the VSS Guide, and/or in the gigantic VSS discussion thread. I'm too tired to look. (Been working too much lately).

Or you could just re-apply some other mat-pose to restore the fingernails as incantrix does.

As for the lips, some people actually use different node settings for the lip material zone. But I really discourage that. It works ok for a figure that is really far away, but up close you see a hard edge that is very unrealistic. For this reason, I wish nobody had ever included a separate material zone for the lips. It's much better to have a face texture with the lip color you want blended properly where it joins the skin around the edge of the lips. Or, a more advanced technique, is to have the same shader for lips and face, but the shader includes a mask (like a transmap) that causes a different color and shininess to be used on the lip area.

This is one of the things I've been meaning to get around to for a couple years now - to make a set of lipstick effect masks to be used with VSS. Then you could just dial in what color lips you want, and how shiny, and VSS would take care of it. Same with eyeshadow, eyeliner, and similar stuff. But I'm just too busy with work and haven't done it.

Robynsveil has been working on these things.

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