A shader "tree" is the whole collection of interconnected nodes.

I love RM's character sets. I have a couple of them. She uses a more complicated shader than most vendors. I would make a few corrections to her shaders, but by and large they are good - better than most.

You don't need to show us her node setup, nor are you allowed to. I think I know what they are, because in the products I have from her they are identical - just different texture maps are used.

The shader includes some nodes that absolutely don't do anything at all, as they are connected to the translucence channel with the Translucence_Value set to 0. Those nodes do a bunch of calculations which are then ignored. LOL They render a bit slower than they could because of that.

There is also some peculiar use of a colored spots node connected to the Diffuse_Value. The values end up being so close to the same that the whole chain is doing close to nothing.

There is also a ColorRamp+Diffuse node that adds some redness in shadowed areas (faking subsurface scattering.) This chain causes all kinds of grief with IDL since it makes parts of the character glow red when it should be black in the absence of any light. But that isn't a problem you encountered. This part of the shader was copied from Daz, which was made by face_off, who got the idea from an early skin shader I posted years ago when I was first trying to figure out skin shaders. It amuses me to see how many places this shader subtree shows up in. The Diffuse_Color is set to a light blue to balance against the added red from that branch.

There is a Blinn node for specular, which is the right node. But it has some Edge_Blend stuff in it copied from face_off''s shaders that are reproducing what the Blinn node would do by itself if the parameters had been set correctly in the first place.

Anyway .... long story short, I don't think RM's shaders generally produce overly dark results, or low contrast results. In fact, I'd argue they produce an unrealistic amount of contrast.

Perhaps you could show us a render and talk about your lighting setup.

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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)