How to tweak glossy setting for lips

[Hydra]

Spec maps are very much beasts of the original render engine.

You can do is adjust the specularity map itself to suit your render. You can play with its strength as well as its contrast. You should be careful with how and where you adjust things since you may inadvertently cause a seam to appear in skins. Keep that thought in mind if you do this.

Like so;
http://laticis.deviantart.com/art/Betha ... -584678187

[DrHemulen]

A good specularity map will define those same things, Doc. The wetness/roughness for any given area can be just as dynamic as the other bits mentioned. Consider your lips, which can each be different wetness(es) (like the variance if you lick the right half of your bottom lip).

I agree completely, and that's also how I use them now... but maps for this purpose can be low res and quite blurry, as they just define larger regions (kind of like the redspecs SSS maps). No need for 4K ultra detail pr. pixel detail maps as we see them with DAZ content. These are usually just the diffuse put through a filter or two anyways.

I was just wondering if I misunderstood something, especially since Iray materials for DAZ items still seem to use these maps, and that's supposed to be just as unbiased?

[sikotik13]

You are correct, and aside from more specific use cases like the ones I mentioned, your method is far more accurate (with the blurry sections, etc.). It is certainly a fault of lazy/ignorant vendors just doing what other ignorant/lazy vendors have always done. Honestly, the difference in map quality among vendors is painful at times, and you can tell which ones genuinely have no clue what they are doing with textures pretty quickly. Unfortunately, those same clueless vendors are often the ones distributing "merchant resource" kits made of horrible mapping practices, which are then regurgitated ad-nauseum by those who consider themselves somehow even less skilled in that area. Truthfully, it looked bad in biased rendering, so I can't fathom why any of them think it works in unbiased, but all of those bad mapping practices just transferred over to the new engines. I highly doubt it's much, if any, better on the Poser side of the fence at this point.

Part of the problem with a business model designed on rehash and resell is that anything bad that gets mixed in tends to stay mixed in, especially if it makes it faster/easier to crap out something "new."