Skin work in progress

I've been wanting/waiting to do photo referenced skin tones like these for quite a while! Comments and suggestion are welcome, as these are works in progress. Both are using the same shape settings for now, but will eventually have thier own.

They both look beautiful.

I would definitely save up to buy either. Keep going.

Both look real good. Though seeing your work in progress just makes me think where are men models? Dont they sell or what? I have bought your Adam skin but i would love to see new models expecially moderately tanned maybe something like (Evie_Deepolive) and with bald hair for prim hairs.

Well now when i looked your website i saw Vince model. I have to go to check it soon.

Thanks for the feedback! I've been getting requests for "bald" and "tanner" versions of the male and female skins, so I may do some updates along those lines. Actually, the two skins here are in response to requests for darker female skins. Vince is definately more tanned than Adam, but is an entirely different character (more gritty!). I've been mainly focusing on a HUGE selection of male facial hair and scars (not yet released), all hand rendered at photographic quality. It's a pitty no one will see the 2048x2048 details after they get reduced to 512x512, but such is the nature of avatar pixel pushing.

The 2 female skins here (and a third I haven't posted yet) will take up about 200 hours of work time in between my regular job. If I could clone myself I would, but the benefits of time delay mean I can post images here while the works are in progress and get constructive feedback. I also have friends testing some on their avatars. Every little bit helps.

Yes actually i love gritty feeling of Vince (what i saw from Secondskin website). I mainly RP in Gor sims so having scarred skin can be considered realistic like moderate tanning muscles showing better than on "avarage" people. Scars would be definately good addition.

Here's the final shape on the dark skin. It may take a few seconds to animate.

Looks great!

Outstanding!!

Third installment: A radiant Irish complexion
The shape is final. The skin is going through final paces.

Beautiful, Namssor!

Lovely work, Nam, as always. I just recently released one using the same source as the first one you posted. It's always fun to see how yours turn out relative to mine since we use such similar techniques. I did mine as a hybrid blend with some other source so they turned out quite differently. Love the redhead too!

Thanks Chip (Cristalle, and George)! When I saw the source photos come out early this April I said to myself - "yes, finally Mr. Levius has come out with a new black skin reference". I too heavily supplemented and modified a lot of areas on the skin with other references because of heavy acne scars, stretch marks, and what looked like knife wounds to the neck and abdomen. Even with those blemishes, her beautiful features stood out prominently (the lips especially). Not something I wanted to pass up. I hope I captured them well in the translation.

I bet you can guess the major parts of the fair skinned source too from the eyes.

...and a question - If you had to choose between one version or the other, which would it be (left or right)?

right one for me, I do not like the longer side hairs

the one on the right.

Hmmm...just darker and smaller for me. Whoops! Just having an optician flashback.

Seriously though, this is beyond amazing work.

Why is Evie being retired?
And where are the promised cherry red lips?

The entire Evie skin line is NOT being retired. I wounldn't think of it!! Only the Evie Anatase is being retired. That skin tone doesn't sell well compared to the rest. I was also not able to produce all the options I wanted for it, and as such is a glaring inconsistency amongst the other Evie skin tones for custom makeovers. In hindsight, I can now see it pushed the original skin tone too far into the dark for Latino features. After doing Renie (that is the official name for the new black skin, in honor of Renie Sulaweyo of Otherland fame ), I can now say I have a much more realistic "darker" skin tone with features to match (shown below).



Yes, I remember the lips. I have held off producing new GX content for an extremely GOOD reason (trust me) . Nonetheless, your patience deserves reward. I will be in touch through IM or PM.

I've been testing makeup (lips, shadow, freckles) and hair/eyebrow colors on Lyra. Here are two samples of some pre-existing GX makeup applied to Lyra with different hair colors. For those familiar with the system, the left image uses FGXL005G, FGXS001, and FGXF001. The right image uses FGXL000G (Clear Gloss), FGXS003, and FGXF001.




Ok, I promise this is the last post before I start releasing some of these skins.

OMIGOSH! She's gorgeous!

Verynice! Glad to hear you're working on darker and tan skin tones. I've been looking for a good one for awhile, but usually end up with lighter toned ones because the shadowed areas on darker skins were usually awful.

I finally figured out why - in real life, I tan very well, and look much better tanned (as do most people). A major reason is that blemishes, under-eye circles, etc. tend to fade away when tanned (scars are the opposite though - they don't tan). Most dark SL skin tends to keep the same relationships between lighter and darker areas as the lighter tones, although if SL skin designers are working with layers, I'm not sure why.

I wasn't going to post back here right away, but this is an important point. Sorry! - Broke my promise.

In this case the procedural limitations outweigh the textural limitations. Scars and blemishes are easily removed from photo sourced skins, and probably never unintentionally exist in hand drawn skins in the first place.

Many dark skins are created by color shifting a lighter skin tone. The reverse is true for very light skins. Why create a new set of skin textures completely from scratch when you can globally color shift the existing skin textures? That is sometimes easier said than done, especially with photo sourced skins. The file setup (layering) and color gamut of the original skin texture is a huge determining factor in how far the texture's color can be pushed (from the original/default) and still maintain a believable over all look.

Hand drawn skins may be less realistic than photo sourced skins because they often wash over the details with an airbrushed or heavily stylized feel, but they also have the advantage of multiple layering effects to create the visible skin details (i.e. Eloh's skin files work this way). Thus, they probably handle light to dark color shifting better than most photo sourced skin designs.

Photo sourced skins more often than not deal with blended layers in subsets where the highlights and shadows are represented at a micro detail level in each layer (i.e. Renie's forehead is a nice example). Therefore the best looking photo sourced skins usually stay within a tight color gamut. If a dark skin is desired, the photo sources must be dark. The same goes for very light skins. Medium toned photo sourced skins are a little more forgiving. For those reasons a wide range of realistic photo sourced skin tones are more likely to be created from unique sets of source material rather than one color shifted set of source material. This process is much more time consuming, and the reason why photo sourced skins tend to be pricier than hand drawn skins.

Anyways, if your not a skin designer, don't worry about all this technical crap. Let your inner feelings speak to you. Skin choices are highly personal, and if the character of the skin does not play well with your avatar or your virtual self image, demo the next one. But do keep in mind that each unique skin probably represents weeks if not months of someones persistent creative efforts.

Makeup test on Renie



This is the direction I'm heading in with Renie. It looks like she will require unique makeup textures for the dark pigmentation and fuller lips, so I may wind up including 5-6 variations in the skin package/kit. The custom GX makeovers will not work as well on this skin because they lack complex layering effects (color dodge, overlay, vivid light, etc.).

I've only "worried about technical crap" while trying to ponder why I've only bought pale skins, when I've been looking for a nice tanned one. I'd much rather have a pale skin that looks right, than a dark one that looks gruesome, which is somewhat the opposite to real life - where a good tan often looks great! And the reason is that simply color shifting a skin far from its source just doesn't work and misses the point about why people like to get tanned in real life, despite the health risks (which isn't an issue in SL.)

Although much darker than what I was looking for, Renie is awesome! And makes clear that a beautiful tanned skin needs to be designed that way from the very beginning. Great job! I'm also impressed with the "winter" colors make-up that you chose, especially the lipstick, which work great with Renie's skin tone. It's hard to find good skin tone color matching in SL makeup.

About skin tone color matching in general:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_tone_color_matching

Example colors:
http://www.carolthompsoncosmetics.com/IBS/SimpleCat/Shelf/ASP/Hierarchy/04.html