ghostship2 posted at 10:37 AM Fri, 26 May 2023 - #4466444

Just a handy tip from your uncle Ghostship: You might want to de-saturate and lighten the tattoo so it looks natural and "under" the skin. You can do this in Photoshop or by using a HSV node. On the old shader I used to use I achieved this look by plugging the natural skin map into the Separate RGB node instead of  the map with the tattoo. If you use a seperate tattoo layer something else has to happen. Notice that the colors and blacks are not deep or saturated, you would not expect that from a real tattoo on real skin. Also make sure that the tattoo layer is using the same bump map and values.

I knew you'd be able to improve it!  As my original thought was simply to make the new layers available as a series of freebies, sans Shana's artwork, I didn't want to perform any operation that altered the original artwork.  I wouldn't be able to distribute the original artwork as modified, of course.  So, if I was to modify the hundreds of layers (I get shaky thinking of doing that again), I'd probably seize upon your suggestion of the HSV. Uh, will I have to use different HSV settings for different skin colors?

And I will probably deliberately do it the wrong way where bump maps are concerned, at least if I'm distributing as freebies:  if any character texture used a different bump map or different settings, I would then need to make a new layer for that character texture.  As bad as they are now, they are "universal" for a given character geometry. Any V4 layer will cheerfully work on a different V4 character texture. Although I should probably incorporate your comments into a readme file to remind myself that the layers can be further improved with your tweaks.  What I might not want to do for two hundred and fifty layers, I might be willing to do for a specific scene. Especially if it involved closeups where my quick and dirty techniques might become more painfully obvious.

Thanks very much for the observations and advice!