Oh, and just to say, I don't mean that looking unrealistic to my eyes is some sort of sin or inherent problem.  There's lots of quality characters out there that look great in other people's works, and just don't work for me.  I'm just trying to say that I think I understand the issue that cedarwolf brought up, and that I've experienced it myself to some extent.   I'm hoping that sharing the small steps I've taken to address it are helpful. 

Oh, also to clarify- I mentioned not redistributing for any newbies that come across this thread and get the wrong idea.  I don't mean to imply that anyone posting so far wouldn't know that or would redistribute someone else's edited textures. Unless they were a merchant resource, that is.

Latexluv- I'm working on a reply.

Quote - Add to the mix palms of hands, soles of feet, how much sun some areas get vs. how much others get and you wind up with a whole mixed bag.

That's really tricky, because most of what we think of as "realism" is generally from photos rather than life.  Most of the photos and film we see are of people with quite a lot of make up.  Most of the media we look at are highly post produced.  I've done images with Blackhearted textures that looked odd to me because he made his textures so realistic that the outside of the arms were very red and darker, while the inside was much paler and less red.  That's quite natural for an outdoors, atheletic person, but can look unusually uneven in a render.

At the end of the day, you have to make your own judgement about what looks right.  Once you do, don't be afraid to edit textures you own to look like what you want.  Just don't save over the originals and don't redistribute them.  If you use Photoshop, adjustment layers can give you a non-destructive transformation that you can copy to other maps.  You can use other textures, flood fills, and seamless skin patterns as overlays, and then use masks to non-destructively vary their effect.   All of those are easy to copy to other documents, so that you can make your textures consistent across UV maps.  If you paint corrections or changes on top, just avoid the seams and you'll be fine.

As for real world ethnicity being a complex issue, I considered that a given and beside the point of this thread.   There are tons of realistic characters of visibly European heritage.  The ones that are supposed to visibly show any other type of heritage are often much less realistic, IMHO and (based on the original post) the opinion of the OP.

I've seen many characters that get darker tones inhumanly wrong to my eyes (wrong hue and saturation, like I said).  I've seen many with burned in artifacts that make them problematic with my materials.   Even in lighter shades, there are certain skin types and hues I've found difficult to obtain.  Just considering different types of textures, there are huge gaps in my library that I've deliberately sought to fill, and been unable to.   All of those types are particular to non-European ethnicities.

What can do is separate out your dermal and subdermal scattering.  Dermal should change with your skin type and melanin.  It should basically be a light, desaturated base with different amounts of yellow/tan (depending on melanin), and be wide but not deep.  Subdermal should be red and less wide (flesh being denser than skin) but deep. 

Personally, I use two Custom_Scatter, some edge blend, and some other tricks to make skin.  I mix based on the skin type and tone.

Here's an example of the Elite Marie texture with my skin shader (sorry, it's only on deviantARTT right now):

http://kobaltkween.deviantart.com/art/The-Look-II-348227822

And I've attached an image with a more tan texture than that one.   I sort of hacked it together by mixing maelwenn's Vanessa and J.King's Alayeh together.  It's still probably darker and flatter than you're thinking of, but I thought I'd include it as an example of what I've done with this method.

Neither are Native American skin tones, I realize, but what I'd consider a fairly realistic darker skin tones.   I also realize that only addresses the material.   I've only bought one NA texture set, and I can't quite say the skin tone is realistic.  Most I see just don't seem quite right in hue or saturation, so I can understand your concern (not quite right to me is probably glaring to you). 

That said, I also find it hard to find very pale textures, but I often make do with what I have and Photoshop.  As long as I have a decent detailed base, some decent skin brushes (there are tons on the Web) and some idea of the tone I want to achieve, I can do pretty much anything I want.

Soft and hard decorations follow cloth.  They're not rigid or soft body dynamics.  Hard decorated groups over multiple polygons of cloth can actually bend to follow the cloth.  They don't move around their own center or some such.  They just follow the cloth underneath them.

I don't have a grip on exactly what you're trying to accomplish (I could use the references myself), but I can tell you what I do when I want something to sim a single rigid body, like a pendant on a necklace: I create a one poly dynamic piece that goes underneath it with an invisible material (0 diff, 0 spec, 1 trans, no trans falloff).   The limitation is this doesn't work for other things colliding with it, because that one poly doesn't actually have thickness.

Also, you might want to make this a figure with dynamic and rigid parts.   IIRC, bopperthijs has a free beach chair in Freestuff that shows how that can be done.  Yep, he does.

If you have the money to upgrade to P10, then the answer is rigid body dynamics. 

Congratulations!

Oh, I think it will turn out great.  It looks good as is.  I'm just interested in this as a general mesh building problem.

I looked at the Blender solutions for this type of problem, just because I was curious.  I thought I'd pass along what I found in case you were interested in the methodologies for other projects. 

The most interesting by far was using particles for chain mail.  You make the particle mesh the 2 or more rings you need to for your chosen interlocking pattern to work (there's lots of different chain mail patterns), and make sure the emitter emits one particle per vertex and has as regular a topology as you can make.  It's not absolutely perfect, but it works most of the time.  The benefit is being able to clothify the emitter and have the chain mail automatically follow the cloth.  I've seen people sim that sort of mesh with rigid bodies, and it was generally more involved.

The second was pretty simple, but I think it works the opposite of what you did in the first one (though I'm not sure).  You make the flat mesh shape first, then you bend it.  That was naturally the way I would have done it, so I thought maybe you had avoided it because it breaks.  But seeing it in action, it seems to work OK.

I saw that you avoided the problem by reorienting the weave, and noticed that it did follow the edges horizontally.  It looks nice, and kind of makes me think of an outdoor lounge chair.  But I also noticed that you still didn't maintain vertical density, which is what I was talking about.

No, you shouldn't need to do it manually.  I don't see why you should need to manage the vertical shape manually when you already have it following the frame horizontally.  Not that I don't see how your original method caused problems, just that I'd think there would be a fairly similar way to make it work.  Especially since there doesn't seem to be a change in the curve along the x axis.

You might find a generic and holistic solution if you look into chain mail techniques.  Different type of weave, but the same basic issue.  Or, of course, how to make a peacock chair.

I'm not sure I understand why you think it's the math of the surface that makes the problem.  As far as I can tell, it's a pretty basic issue that you'd see in any shape with a non-uniform width or height, even a planar triangle. 

It looks like your problem is very simple: you're changing your density with your width.  In real life, the density of the weave would never change, but the amount of it would.  The ribs would lead down and stop when they hit the edge.  So the middle might be as you'd have it now, but the the top and bottom would  have at least one more rib on either side.  Given the current spacing of ribs, of course.  Or, in the first design, the woven parts would stop when they hit the edge.  Just like you've got them doing horizontally in the second design.  As they followed a path in the z and y planes, they shouldn't have shifted in the x direction.

But maybe I'm missing something.

Just to say, I avoid conforming all together.  I realize this isn't something most people are comfortable with, so it's not a general solution, but I thought I'd share my techniques just as an option.  I find conforming too restrictive in general, so I tend to find ways around it.

When I use conforming hair, I often parent it rather than conform and just pose the hair to fit the pose.   Shoes I tend to convert to left and right props, when I use them (which is, admittedly, rarely).  Just recently, I found that making shoes that bend, like flats or sandals, work fairly well as entirely constrained dynamic props.  I had the sim pretty fast and without any problems.  Heels don't really bend much, so I don't really have to worry about those. 

Mind, I did this before using V4 WM.  I like to scale my figure's body parts, and that would break conformers until recently.   Not to mention, my library is old enough to have quite a lot of hair for different figures that aren't V4 at all.  Like the Ultimate Ponytail 1 (V1 & V2) and 2 (V3).

Yay!  I can't wait to try out the finished product! 

1. My guess is that you should model it a bit differently, and make sure its got an appropriate density.  Though, really, I'm unclear about how the physics of what you're looking for would work.  This is where I'd start using reference images that specifically matched poses and hair styles to test the simulation settings.

2.  Sharp shadows are generally a lighting issue.  What are you lights like?  I'm not sure about your trans maps, because how fine they get is so much a personal perspective on how many fine strands you should see.  That said, I've found my worst problem with trans maps has been making them too fine and painting them like I do hair.  Most trans maps I've studied have been fairly thick.  The ones that haven't been have needed me to render with the right combination of low shading rate and texture filtering.

Actually, that's the main thing choosing OSL seems to have done:  unified its lighting model.  Shading and illuminating aren't separate.  Emission is emission, whether it's the shader for a "light" or a mesh.  Lights actually make more fireflies and resolve slower, in my experience.  I suspect because they don't actually have dimension.

Oh!  And the one thing that is useful in terms of controlling specular value on hair is the the trans map.  You don't want shine where there's not supposed to be mesh.

Quote - Those look great too!

If it's alright with you, I'll play around with the materials in that post you linked to get a good starting material for the hair?

Oh, sure!  You just might want to replace the Reflection node with a Specular node.  The reflection works because that's an older hair by Kozaburo, so it has a great shape and few layers.  Lots of layers and pieces make reflection take way too long.

Quote - Shinyness can really differ in different hairs too, at least from what I get from reference pictures. Anything from matted barbarian hair to a conditioner commercial... I've used the material room mostly for clothing, and for altering existing hairs and skins to get the results I want.

Oh, definitely.  It's just that you don't generally need to do finer control than to set the shininess for a particular hair material you're working on.  If you have really poofy hair that's pulled back, the pulled back part might be shinier than the poof.  But that's about the only time you'd have different.

I've done quite a lot of work with materials and lights.  I've scripted my main material library (which I sell here) with Matmatic.  That simple hair material I posted to my gallery is me just playing around and experimenting, so that I made by hand.  When I have the basic properties and relationships  in place, I turn it into a script and put all the features it should have into place, in addition to separating out the key parameters.