How do you make glossy lips?

I used caisson's skin setting.( Poser photorealism and superfly skin setup needed please )

Have you tried increasing the specular value higher?  And from what I see, your Surface value is too high.  Decrease that value to a starting point of 0.01.  Your teeth are showing a self-glowing effect.

You will notice in the one that Caisson used, that the lips are darker in the Roughness map. This makes the lips shinier. 

Can you answer one question though?  Is that a "Specular" map, or a "Roughness" map that you have connected to roughness? It looks like it might be Specular, which works differently. I will work up an example for Specular map connections.

The Physical Surface node and the Principled BSDF node work much better with metallic and roughness maps than with specular and gloss maps as used in older Poser shaders.  Specular maps typically show shinier areas as lighter colors. Roughness maps are the opposite, they show shinier areas as darker colors.  It’s not a simple matter of inverting the specular map to turn it into a roughness map. There are other differences as well.  There is a “Gloss/Specular Converter” compound node furnished with Poser 11 and 12 that will help make Specular maps work correctly with the Physical Surface and Principled BSDF nodes. 

1) Go to the Poser 11 (or 12) Content > SuperFly Tileable > !Guide folder. In there, you will find a Spec Gloss PBR shader.  Select a PREVIEW material in your scene (do not apply it directly to the character’s skin). After you apply it you’ll see a whole bunch of different images with text guides attached to the physical surface node. You don’t need those. ONLY copy the Gloss/Specular Converter node. After you do that you can delete all the maps connected to the root node.

2) Copy and paste that Converter node into your figure’s head material.  (There is a red outline around this node in the screenshot). 

3) Drag and drop the Specular image for the head texture into the material editor. NOTE that you will need to set the Custom Gamma to 1 for ANY map that is not a color map. This will be true of bump, displacement, specular, metallic, roughness, AND normal maps (the reason your preview squares look funny in the material room is because your normal map is not using custom value of 1). The only map that should use the default gamma settings is the diffuse map. The shininess on the lips in this case is ALSO coming from the specular map.

4) Connect the Specular Map to the Specular INPUT connection, and adjust the color chip to choose a light to medium gray color. Pure white will add too much shine.  Also, set the Gloss setting to around .1 for starters. Adjust both settings until you are satisfied with the results on the skin.

5) Connect the Roughness and Specular outputs from the Gloss/Specular Converter Node to the Roughness and Specular inputs of the Principled BSDF node.

6) Adjust your Subsurface Radius to 0.004820, 0.001690, 0.001090. This is a good value for caucasian skin.  For darker skin, try 0.003670, 0.001370, 0.000680

All the other skin materials in your character will need these changes done as well. Lips, torso, and limbs.  You’ll also notice that instead of assigning a subsurface color, I put the skin textures through an HSV node, and adjusted the saturation and value to .95 of the original. This would use a slightly grayer and darker version of the skin texture colors for the SSS.

The other option you have to add shininess to the lips is to disconnect the Roughness map entirely in the Lip material, and then lower the roughness value until you get the amount of shine you want. However, this will only affect the LIP material and you may need to use a mask to soften the edges between the lip and face material.

I agree with you on using the Metallic channel to drive the specular effect, that was my first thought.  I have also used the converter on many occasions to control the glossy; an excellent feature although most of the time I need to color the specular chip a shade of gray depending on the quality of the specular map.  The HVS node is crucial, IMHO.

However, I never drive the Surface channel value that high, I usually keep it very low, starting at approximately 0.01 - 0.015.  If you use this value in combination with a low-resolution HDRI as lighting, you get fireflies in your render.  Most annoying.  As for the Subsurface Radius values, though, those values you provided are too low.  I would use 0.482, 0.169, and 0.109 as a starting point or find other values posted on the web.  Below is an illustration of why I selected those values.

I usually connect a CombineRGB node to drive the Surface Radius RGB values on the PrincipledBsdf node, and as you can see in the image that the higher values give you color tone while the lower values only give you black.  Under these circumstances, the Subsurface Color is providing the SSS tone for the skin.

Using the values you suggest in the Subsurface Radius results in this effect around the mouth and eyes when applied to the head.  It still shows some of that blue effect even when adjusting the values to one tenth of that.

Reduce the Surface value to 0.01.

Also important to note ... the RGB values in Subsurface Radius do not represent a color, they represent a radius value. According to Cycles documentation:

Average distance that light scatters below the surface. Higher radius gives a softer appearance, as light bleeds into shadows and through the object. The scattering distance is specified separately for the RGB channels, to render materials such as skin where red light scatters deeper. The X, Y and Z values are mapped to the R, G and B values, respectively.

hborre posted at 10:38 AM Mon, 23 January 2023 - #4454490

Reduce the Surface value to 0.01.

The Subsurface Value is a multiplier that controls the scattering radius.

In other words, using a scale of 1 and subsurface radius of 0.004820, 0.001690, 0.001090 would result in the same effect as using a scale of .01 and radius settings of 0.482, 0.169, and 0.109.  Either works equally well.

I see your point, I'm just very uncomfortable with very high Surface values where environmental lighting is concerned.  Low-resolution HDRI appears to complicate the SSS response through the skin creating Fireflies during Superfly rendering.  Only by modifying the illumination values of the HDR image or using high-resolution images have I solved my particular issues.

Understood. 8-)

Wherever you'd like to add glossiness (skin, lips, etc), if you don't  want to touch the base skin settings, you can add a second layer and this:

Till now, I'm not completely convinced by playing with the roughness/specular settings of the PrincipledBSDF node.
Adding a second layer allows you to better control the effects, at least it works for me as I've written a script for this.

And don't forget that with Poser12's last iteration, you may even save the second layer separately, for later uses.

hborre posted at 8:20 AM Mon, 23 January 2023 - #4454474

Have you tried increasing the specular value higher?  And from what I see, your Surface value is too high.  Decrease that value to a starting point of 0.01.  Your teeth are showing a self-glowing effect.

Thank you so much. I'll do as you say.

DCArt posted at 9:45 AM Mon, 23 January 2023 - #4454480

The Physical Surface node and the Principled BSDF node work much better with metallic and roughness maps than with specular and gloss maps as used in older Poser shaders.  Specular maps typically show shinier areas as lighter colors. Roughness maps are the opposite, they show shinier areas as darker colors.  It’s not a simple matter of inverting the specular map to turn it into a roughness map. There are other differences as well.  There is a “Gloss/Specular Converter” compound node furnished with Poser 11 and 12 that will help make Specular maps work correctly with the Physical Surface and Principled BSDF nodes. 

1) Go to the Poser 11 (or 12) Content > SuperFly Tileable > !Guide folder. In there, you will find a Spec Gloss PBR shader.  Select a PREVIEW material in your scene (do not apply it directly to the character’s skin). After you apply it you’ll see a whole bunch of different images with text guides attached to the physical surface node. You don’t need those. ONLY copy the Gloss/Specular Converter node. After you do that you can delete all the maps connected to the root node.

2) Copy and paste that Converter node into your figure’s head material.  (There is a red outline around this node in the screenshot). 

3) Drag and drop the Specular image for the head texture into the material editor. NOTE that you will need to set the Custom Gamma to 1 for ANY map that is not a color map. This will be true of bump, displacement, specular, metallic, roughness, AND normal maps (the reason your preview squares look funny in the material room is because your normal map is not using custom value of 1). The only map that should use the default gamma settings is the diffuse map. The shininess on the lips in this case is ALSO coming from the specular map.

4) Connect the Specular Map to the Specular INPUT connection, and adjust the color chip to choose a light to medium gray color. Pure white will add too much shine.  Also, set the Gloss setting to around .1 for starters. Adjust both settings until you are satisfied with the results on the skin.

5) Connect the Roughness and Specular outputs from the Gloss/Specular Converter Node to the Roughness and Specular inputs of the Principled BSDF node.

6) Adjust your Subsurface Radius to 0.004820, 0.001690, 0.001090. This is a good value for caucasian skin.  For darker skin, try 0.003670, 0.001370, 0.000680

All the other skin materials in your character will need these changes done as well. Lips, torso, and limbs.  You’ll also notice that instead of assigning a subsurface color, I put the skin textures through an HSV node, and adjusted the saturation and value to .95 of the original. This would use a slightly grayer and darker version of the skin texture colors for the SSS.

Thank you very very much DCArt for explaining in detail like this.

I was really touched by your kindness.

Y-Phil posted at 3:00 AM Tue, 24 January 2023 - #4454532

Wherever you'd like to add glossiness (skin, lips, etc), if you don't  want to touch the base skin settings, you can add a second layer and this:

Till now, I'm not completely convinced by playing with the roughness/specular settings of the PrincipledBSDF node.
Adding a second layer allows you to better control the effects, at least it works for me as I've written a script for this.

And don't forget that with Poser12's last iteration, you may even save the second layer separately, for later uses.

Thank you Y-Pill. That's a very simple way. I love it.

DCArt posted at 8:27 AM Mon, 23 January 2023 - #4454475

You will notice in the one that Caisson used, that the lips are darker in the Roughness map. This makes the lips shinier. 

Can you answer one question though?  Is that a "Specular" map, or a "Roughness" map that you have connected to roughness? It looks like it might be Specular, which works differently. I will work up an example for Specular map connections.

I'm sorry for the late reply. For roughness I used bump map.