This Daz3D Change Skin Color tutorial shows you step by step how to modify your genesis skin color. Default Genesis figures all have pretty similar skin and its color.
If you prefer watching a video see below, or continue reading.
Even most of the figures you can get on the Daz3D Shop have similar skin types. But in reality people are a lot more diverse than that. They have the most different skin colors and details. So How can you represent that in the Daz Studio? How can you make someone look really pale or make them darker? There are ways and we are going to introduce them.
Daz3D How to Change Skin Color Manually
There are two main ways that you can change the settings of your character’s skin. One is a simpler way and another is more advanced that proposes more variety but harder to utilize.
Simple Skin Color Change
To utilize this method we will need to go to the Skin settings that can be found in the “Editor” of the “Surface” tab.
Here we are interested in the “Translucency Weight” settings. By default it is set to the value of 0.5
Working with this setting is really simple. Higher you set the value – the darker skin will look.
Translucency Weight set to 0.85
In the similar way – the lower you will set the value – paler your figure will look.
Translucent Weight set to 0.15
So this allows for quite some experimenting. You can easily make your characters look more unique. Though there is a problem that you should have noticed – nails and lips. In both examples they stand out a lot and look out of place.
This can be fixed without really being a problem. All you need is to find the both Nails and Lips settings under the “Surfaces” still in the same window.
And change the value of “Translucency Weight” so it would be similar to the value you set for the skin.
Easier way is that at the very beginning you could have selected the “Skin-Lips-Nails” option to select them all. This is useful when you want all of them to have exactly the same values.
Advanced Skin Color Change
If you go back to the “Skin”/“Skin-Lips-Nails” settings, where we changed the “Translucency Weight” – right beneath it you can find the “Translucency Color” and the “SSS Reflectance Tint”.
They work in combination with the “Translucency Weight”. The higher its value – the closer skin looks to the colors you set. You can see this if you set it to 1.0, the character will definitely have a red tint that is there by default.
Changing these values can change how your character looks. You can make so “Translucency Weight” will not make your character look darker, but something else.
For example values above change it so it looks more like tan, than dark skin.
Also this allows for easy creation of outwardly looking characters, such as this:
But you need to be careful with these settings as changing them even slightly can and will change how your character looks by a lot.
Making Skin Glossy and Reflective
Skin Color is not the only thing that differs one person from another. People have really different skin glossiness and reflectiveness too. Meaning that someone’s skin can be naturally really glossy and vice versa. The default characters skin settings in Daz Studio do not really show that.
To change the look of the skin in this way you will need to find the “Dual Lobe Specular” option and change the “Dual Lobe Specular Weight” there from 0 to something bigger.
Even something as low as 0.2 can change the look of your character dramatically. They will look as glossy as if they are wet.
Or if you change the “Dual Lobe Specular Reflectivity” to something lower their skin will become really specular but not reflective. So the feeling of wetness would be gone.
In the neighbouring “Glossy” settings you can change the reflectivity, roughness and even color of the skin glossiness.
So if I, for example, up the “Dual Lobe Weight” a bit, make glossiness reflective and change
“Glossy Color” to blue – I can achieve a really wet look, like if my character just were in water.
Daz3D Products to Change Skin
Yes, you can manually change the skin by changing settings like we showed. But there are products on the Daz3D Shop that can and will make your life significantly easier. There is the Ultimate PBRSkin Manager that makes it easy to customize skin color quickly.
Source Ultimate PBRSkin Manager by V3Digitimes
Another example is SF Beautiful Skin Iray Genesis 8 Female by Fuseling & Sickleyield. It is the Iray Shaders presets. They include basic presets to apply the shader and normal maps and detailed presets to apply many tints and shades of skin, whether light or dark or alien.
Source SF Beautiful Skin Iray Genesis 8 Female by Fuseling & Sickleyield
Another similar item is the Altern8 – Skin Shader System for Genesis 8 by 3Diva. It is a Skin Shader system. Meaning that it also includes shader presets. But furthermore you can do a lot of additional settings such as skin translucency strength, eye enhancement, SSS tint and more.
Altern8 – Skin Shader System for Genesis 8 by 3Diva
Last but not least is the Skin Builder 8 for Genesis 8 available only for Females by Discobob & Zev0. It is not a Shader Preset it is a full all in one skin creation and skin modification system. Meaning that it allows you to customise skin in a lot of different and better than default ways. For example it can go as far as add tan lines and freckles.
Source Skin Builder 8 for Genesis 8 by Discobob & Zev0
Conclusion
There are a lot of different people living in the world and all of them have different skin and now with this Daz3D Change Skin Color tutorial you should be ready to represent all of them. Check out our Daz3D Texture Tutorial: All about Textures, Materials and Shaders to learn about other kinds of textures and shaders and how to customize them.