#Skin System

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

umbral ember
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I’m working on a skin system shader where I want to add colors on top of a base albedo. The issue is that I can’t get the colors to blend properly, and my skin ends up looking wrong:

Problem A: The added colors are barely visible because the base albedo dominates, especially with darker colors.

Problem B: The colors end up way too bright and don’t blend naturally with the base.

I’ve tried a few setups: one makes the colors almost invisible, the other makes them too bright. I’m struggling to find a method that tints the base albedo while preserving deep, rich colors, without them being washed out or too muted.

Here’s what my configurations look like:

First image: Problem A – colors are barely visible, with editor color property and in-game result.

Second image: Problem B – colors are too bright, with editor color property and in-game result.

I’d love advice on how to blend the added colors in Shader Graph so they tint the base albedo naturally without losing the depth of the skin tones.

image.png image.png
old mesa
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How familiar are you with the concepts, I mean

umbral ember
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Somewhat familiar

old mesa
# umbral ember Somewhat familiar

Lerping would be the same as overwriting, so if you lerp to a solid color you'll be replacing detail and color variance with that solid color

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In the second image the base map's color variance is being discarded altogether as you're lerping between green and darker multiplied green

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The lerp after the multiply is redundant

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If you want tinting you'll want to blend a color to the colors of the base map
Not blend to just one color channel of the base map, and not overwrite it

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Blend node is helpful, though usually Multiply node is perfectly good

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The downside of Multiply is that it always darkens the result, but unlike with image editors you have the option to multiply the color by some value above 1 first so multiplication occurs beyond normalized 0 to 1 value range and brightens the result
Prefer to go through a Saturate node after the blending to ensure the result is in normalized range

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The colors on the base map can be anything, so it's not common that you can use one color channel of it as the tint mask
But possible if you author your base maps to always have maskable areas weighted towards one channel as with your red areas there

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Blend node helpfully provides an opacity variable for the blend to use with any type of mask, for Multiply too

umbral ember
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Thank you for the detailed breakdown, what you've said makes sense. I'll have a go at it later once I'm available and see if I achieved the result I wanted. :)