Where would I plug in a mask to keep the brows from getting faded out when rendering? Specular channel has a specular map already plugged in so not sure where I would do that?

Thank you Richard

To add. I did check out the Reference Guide and unless I'm not searching correctly (Mask is the search word) I can't find anything that points me in the right direction.

Richard,

Can you give a little more detail as to what you are trying to accomplish? I have worked with trans mapped brows a lot ... What model are you using? And please show your mat room settings. I have some ideas, but need to know these settings first. ?

Hi Boni, You know I'm working with just L'Homme right now! DeeCey offered advice hooking it up but I was so busy yesterday in the real world I never got around too it!

For my first pack for L'Homme I'm trying to make things work equally in both rendering engines so I'm just using the Poser Root Node. All I want to do is just kill ALL of the overlay specular to keep the brows (and other mapped facial hair) from getting that dull shiny look. Here is my current set up. As you can see the mask is loaded but not hooked up!

Here is a finished render of Gino. The brows still look washed out to me, I had 5 lights in the scene but turned off 2 of them to see if that would darken things back up. In the preview they look darker but rendered they lighten back up allot.

The problem is your eyebrow textures are being effected by the Scatter in render. A mask isn't the way to do this. You want to use a comp node set to detect red to exclude the darker painted eyebrows from the SSS calculation. EZskin/ BB Scatter/Blinn formula resolved this years ago. Your current set up has more problems than that alone.

Another suggestion is to use the trans mapped brow that is part of the figure so that you can adjust it without effecting other textures of the face. I will post a set up tomorrow ... But I will need a gentle nudge (e-mail reminder as RL can get intrusive lately). I look forward to seeing how this develops.

I was going to post a link to a tutorial on how to use the comp node to supress your problem but Boni will help you figure this out.

EldritchCellar: please post the tutorial. My approach may not solve Rich's problem, but just give him more options. I will have it up in a little while.

I made this as simple as I could. Anyone with more help jump in. Questions welcome.

Based on your comment on FB ... here is my suggestion. Remove the SSS entirely. Plug the diffuse into the alt diffuse. Make the specular color neutral grey and lower the value quite a bit. Let us know how that works. I'm not sure you need the mask at all. Not for the specular setting you have here. Finally make sure the gamma setting is custom and set to 1.00.

When I tried the Gamma set to 1.0 the image renders very washed out. So perhaps the SSS is causing that. Part of the SSS though is that it makes the skin look very nice and finished. Is there not a way to replicate that effect without resorting to SSS??

EldritchCellar posted at 12:49PM Tue, 13 October 2020 - #4401309

The problem is your eyebrow textures are being effected by the Scatter in render. A mask isn't the way to do this. You want to use a comp node set to detect red to exclude the darker painted eyebrows from the SSS calculation. EZskin/ BB Scatter/Blinn formula resolved this years ago. Your current set up has more problems than that alone.

Not sure what your meaning is behind my setup has allot of problems. I am NOT a technical person and so I load up various setups, namely Tempesta3d's because her's are so gorgeous when rendered, and tweak here and there but not much really changed, just loaded in my own maps. So if you have a way to help me achieve a nice set up please share. Again, I'm not a technical person by trade, I'm more of an artistic person so allot of this is gobbledygook to me. I understand basics but allot of these nodes are very very foreign to my mind so it will take a while before it all starts sticking. I don't mind EZskin but there are two things about using it, often times it loads in a kazillion nodes, I don't want things to be that complicated in my set up and secondly all those kazillions of nodes ends up with EZ in the header of each node. I don't care for that!

OK, took the dive back into EZSkin. admittedly it's easy to use but yea, so many nodes. The set up is for the limbs. And a render showing the effect. I did add in a Normal map as it gives more detail to the skin. The brows, as a result, are rendering nice and dark so that's a plus!

Weird line around the lips. not sure what's going on there!

LIne around the lips could be adjusted with the mask there I believe. I have some other ideas about the brows ... will work on that tomorrow.

There is no mask at play though, not in this newest attempt to get things squared away. I think the brows look fine now!

Any ideas what could be causing this outline around the lips? I'm sure it's the result of one of the nodes but have NO IDEA which it could be

So I'm going back to my other set up. I don't like this effect with the lined lips. I even tried removing all the maps that I thought were unnecessary from both lips and face and the line persists. SO either it's some weird bug or I just don't understand what I'm doing (and I don't really) with trying to eliminate this new thing that's happening with the lined lips. Grrrrrrrrrrr

Like this newly tweaked set up better I think and the eyebrows rendered out very dark and natural looking. Now I'm just trying to find a UNIVERSAL way for ear glow (as I call it). Again I want this first pack to just utilize the Poser Root Node so it can all work equally between Fire and Superfly engines. If there is a better way to achieve an ear glow let me know. If this is a good set up then I'm there finally with where I'm headed for my Gino for L'Homme