Confused about skin and makeup textures

KND

So i'm trying to make some textures for faces and makeup.

The easy way seems to be taking the face texture and directly add the makeup to that, but when exchanging the face texture it doesn't always show in the render or sometimes kinda it looks off. So i wanted to create seperate textures for makeup that can be overlayed on top of the skin texture, again it doesn't always show, and when it does it looks nothing like the texture itself. I've been trying to apply skins and makeups on different preset characters to see what would happen, the results are vastly different and i lost any sense of consistancy.

So i realized from the characters i own Aiko 8 is the most applicable, her makeup even works well on a dark skin texture or monster skin texture, with some exceptions where nothing shows. So how do i go about doing that, because simply applying makeup and exchanging the texture gives terrible results and i dont know why.

 

JonnyRay

Most makeups that you get with a character also include the face texture. That's why things are looking off to you. They aren't just layering the makup over the skin, they're replacing the skin. There are some packages, however, which use the Layered Image Editor (LIE) to overlay the makeup on top of the skin. I picked up PhilW's Ultimate Makeup for Genesis 8 Females just for this reason. To have some flexible makeup that I can use on any character.

Skin surface settings are some of the more complex shaders you'll deal with. For instance, just layering colors on top of the Base diffuse texture on the face probably will end up with the makeup looking odd because skin also has color maps applied for subsurface scattering.

KND

I'm still considerably new to Daz3d, for now i just want to edit some textures and figure out the basic mechanics behind it, but i want to create original content for the store eventually.

So i got the skin material for Girl 8 applied wich is a complex shader, i can see her eyebrows as a an image with transparancy loaded in surface templates, this is also where her makeup is loaded into the slots if i apply one. I can see her SSS textures wich is just a pale version of the face texture without makeup. When i exchange all textures i can see the texture highlighting some parts, but no color no contrast.

With Aiko 8 i am having more success, the makeup shows, i can see the colors, but it looks very pale as if it takes the opacity and the colordata, but ignores the contrast.

https://imgur.com/a/i8EoDiA

It looks like the makeup texture has a white background, but it's actually black because i noticed the original makeups use black as well. But perhaps something is wrong with the texture file? I'm using PNG to avoid compression, but maybe the engine doesnt like PNG?