As someone very new to texturing, particularly human skin, I find references on things like color zones really helpful. I’m not aiming to achieve realism, just a simple almost blurry representation of skin and the sss colors. I’ve collected quite a few for the face.
I am finding it really difficult to pick out what colors I should be subtly adding to different body parts from real human photos. Does anyone have any guide images they have found helpful they would share?
The image in your post isn’t a SSS map, though. It would imply that knees, nipples, and hair share an amount of SSS with fingertips and ears, and this definitely isn’t the case. I’m not sure what this image is supposed to convey but I’m pretty sure it’s just nonsense. The images linked are talking about something entirely different, so I’m really not sure what exactly you’re looking for here. I can say for sure that you should be very cautious with those facial color zone images, they’re neither universally true nor particularly reliable
If your attached image is supposed to a color zone type thing like your linked examples, it’s also not correct- look at yourself in a mirror and you’ll see immediately. These kind of images really aren’t all that helpful compared to studying real reference and real models- they create a false sense of “this is how the body looks”, when in fact, it differs wildly from person to person. These color zone maps are person specific, and they’re influenced by age, genetics, race, medical history, diet, exercise, disease, gender, and a whole slew of other factors
I’m keeping it very simple at the moment - base color, texture paint very light amounts of red/yellow/blue, and combine with mix shader using alpha as factor. I think I miss spoke when I mentioned SSS - I’ve just stuck that on red with a really low value.
The results are basically good enough for me atm, so essentially what I’m looking for is the same as the red/yellow/blue guide but for the rest of the body. I’m constantly looking at myself but I’m finding it very difficult to pick things out. Just to stress the point, I’m really not looking to achieve high quality results.
Just for fun I drew over your facial color zones map using my own face in the mirror as color reference… and it’s not even close to your result. What I’m saying here is that if you use images like this instead of real people as color reference, your results will look wrong. The colors needs to match the people.
If you really want images like this, get some photographs of people and crank the saturation way, way, up. This will expose the underlying red, yellow, and blue for that person, which will be natural looking for them, vs using a generic zone map that will not be natural looking
Here are two examples for legs that aren’t color zone break downs but are strong enough that you can probably work with it.
There’s a subdermal color zones model on sketchfab here that I’m not sure is totally accurate, and another artists breakdown of a similar attempt here (just upper body).
