Solved: Bright red around eye

paulawp (marahzen)

This character is a work in progress showing a problem that I sometimes encounter and can't seem to fix. The bright red, glowing inner eye - particularly noticeable under the upper lid - is the result of amateurish twiddling with various surface settings - translucency, SSS, etc. Usually I muddle my way through to something useful, but sometimes, I get this. Once it happens, I can't seem to get rid of it - no setting change I try seems to affect it, much less fix it, and I have to start over. I can't even figure out what exact surface is causing the problem. If the eyeball is invisible, there's a general red glow in the eye socket, as if it's emanating from inside the head. Setting the Head to invisible gets rid of the red glow ... and, well, the head also, so it's not much of a solution. Ideas?

 

Spacious

Looks like they eye socket surface has a very high translucency, or is maybe set to thin walled?

paulawp (marahzen)

Thanks, I checked these just now and confirmed suspicious-looking settings. Thin Walled is Off but the translucency color is the problem bright red and translucency weight is .7. However, I tried assorted changes to these settings and it didn't alter the bright red ring - even when I set the translucency weight to 0, or set the translucency color to bright blue. I'm going to try comparing to a similar, unaffected figure. I know I've set something weird here, somewhere. 

Spacious

You could just turn the color to a darker one or add an image to the translucency.  In general you would want the eye socket to have similar setting to the rest of the skin.  There's probably images in the translucency channel of the other skin zones, right?

paulawp (marahzen)

OK, I have just copied and pasted from a stock G8.1 Female figure each relevant surface, one at a time, and I have confirmed that the problem is under "Face" somewhere. I will track this down, and I'll report what it ended up being ...

paulawp (marahzen)

I got to the bottom of this problem. The exact cause is so specific to my process of creating characters that no one else may ever run into it - it appears to be the result of things that can happen when using Face Transfer and Altern8 together, probably in a way that the latter was not intended to be used. Skipping to the chase, the solution is exactly what Spacious suggested: it needs a translucency map. It just needs it in the Face surface.

So if anyone else ever gets to this thread because they're seeing a problem like in my "Before" screen shot, check that. Just to close the book on the problem, here's an "After" although this character is a long way from done. This annoying problem has derailed many characters before and I just wanted to get to the bottom of it. Thanks for the suggestion, Spacious.

Spacious

In case you come back to this thread, I've noticed that translucency maps/colors must be about 10-15% lighter/brighter than diffuse maps/colors in order not to darken the skin.  Any lighter/brighter than that and they tend to make things look illuminated.  Glad you figured it out for this one.

paulawp (marahzen)

Noted. Thanks!