Fixing Skin Surface Settings for Daz Studio
1. Diffuse color: Some content creators like to use a color in the diffuse setting as well as a texture. It can be a good way to lower the ruddiness in a texture or slightly alter the skin tone of a character. However, because Poser handles this somewhat differently the color may be too dark or strong.
2. Specular: A variety of things can be wrong with specularity settings. The primary one however is that the specularity map has not been linked to the strength setting. There will also be times when the specular color is set at black, and you won't get any specularity on the character in that case. Also, Studio and Poser handle specularity maps different so you may need to lower the strength additionally in order to get the right level of specularity for a character.
3. Ambient: Ambient color can help you lighten or darken a skin tone. However, if it is very strong, you will start to have issues with lighting and the color may not be right. You should look at the color used and if the strength setting is to high.
4. Bump: Bump settings imported directly from Poser come in as a very small percentage rather than 100%. Bump maps are another situation where Studio reads maps differently from Poser and you may need to go higher than 100% or you may want to increase slightly the negative or positive settings to get the bump to dip in or stand out more.
Illustration 2: Settings as loaded with a character
Here is where it starts to get subjective. Tastes vary and the texture and maps you get from different creators vary. That means that there are no "perfect" settings that can be used on every character. No matter what, you're going to have to do a few test renders and play with some of the settings before your satisfied with the skin texture.
1. The first change to make is actually optional. Many skin textures benefit from changing the lighting model (at the very bottom of the surface settings) to skin rather than plastic. However, some
textures don't take the additional pinkness well. You can set up some other settings to lower how pink the texture looks or you can change the surface to matte instead. Below is an image of RMTharyn with the skin lighting model applied on the right. You will see that initially it looks worse than just leaving the settings alone, but
that is because some other settings that are off are influencing how she looks.
Illustration 3: Texture on right has lighting model 'Skin'
