Just wondering what peoples thoughts are on what makes for the best kind of diffuse skin maps in terms of colour, brightness & saturation.

Lets say as a point of reference we're talking in terms of an average untanned caucasian skin, for use with a PP2012 SSS material setup.

Looking through the limited number of maps I have in my runtimes there's quite a variance in all three aspects. Most are made using photo resources and have at least some shadow or specular that I usually photoshop out, but besides this there's an overall colour, tone & saturation to a map. Some have mostly a yellow bias, some an orange/red bias. Some are very bright and saturated whilst others are really quite grey.

One theory I read suggested that for most diffuse textures (probably with the exclusion of skin due to it's complexity in how it reacts to light) what you're looking to have is the material as if it had been photographed in bright sunlight. This may well be bogus, I don't know.

In any case I sometimes find it quite tricky to guage how far to tweak a map in a shader setup using the HSV node for example - so easy to blow out one or other aspect, like lips or nipples, whilst trying to achieve that perfect skin tone.

 

PoserPro2014(Sr4), Win7 x64, display units set to inches.

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