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Idrissa the Blond

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Believe it or not, this was mostly about hair. Hair color, actually. Another long one, so, TL;DR version: too much gray screws everything up. You want more detail than that, you gotta read.

Idrissa's skin may be beautiful in this image (and absolutely everything is the same in this image except the color of the shader), but his hair ... not so much, really. As an albino, he's supposed to have hair that's either white or platinum blond. I actually do know a couple albino African-Americans, or ones fair enough for gubmint work, and they're all platinum. And while they all have curly or kinky hair, it does not look like THAT. For some reason, all of the Iray hair shaders tend to make platinum hair look weirdly dingy and kind of filthy. I realize that has a lot to do with the quantity/quality/color of the surrounding light, but all of them have looked pretty dark, no matter what the light -- and in the case of the light up there, it's mostly provided by a big huge white mesh light, with supporting pale pink and pale blue smaller lights, so the light gave no reason for it to look that dingy. So I set out to figure out what was going on and fix it.

Part of the issue, and one you can't get around, is that all three of the Iray hair shaders on the market at the moment are designed to be full material presets -- that is, they're designed to replace the texture of the hair. That won't work with XTech Dreads, because it makes the hair look straight from end to end. So you have to keep the XTech textures (or the Messy Dreads textures, or the Omri Hair textures, or the Vidal Braids textures or anything that's not designed to simply be straight hair), and whatever is done to the Iray hair shader textures to tune them to work with the settings isn't there. That said, when I tried XTech with the textures that came with the shaders, it just looked straight and filthy, so that's not all there is to it.

I went looking through the individual settings for the platinum hair colors, and discovered that apart from the diffuse channel (and in one case, including that), all of the colors were set to varying shades of gray for all the channels. I've figured out one reason for that, which we'll get to in due course, but overall, I have no idea why there's So MUCH of it. So I started tinkering and pulling out a little gray here and a little there, and then getting frustrated and pulling out a LOT of gray here and there and there and over there and WHY you would want a dark gray top coat on platinum hair I'm sure I don't know, and some over there and so on.

The other thing I did was to pull down the translucency channel. Which was a bit tricky, because there wasn't all that much in the first place, but it was the only thing I could figure that was giving his hair that ... well, translucent look. Yes, hair has a certain amount of that, but who ever saw dreads that made you feel like you could see through them if you just looked at the right angle? In the end, I think there's just enough translucency to say it was there, something like .05 or thereabouts.

Oddly enough, you don't want to pull out all the gray. In part, the gray gives some dimension to the texture, in ways I don't get but can live with. However, I think maybe the main reason for a good chunk of the gray is that it's a hard check on the specular/glossiness.

You'll note Idrissa's hair is sort of shiny. If you pull out most of the gray and leave the glossiness/glossy roughness/top coat strengths alone, you wind up with something that's VERY shiny. If it were absolutely straight, that would be fine; straight platinum hair IS very shiny, especially in strong light. For the texture XTech Dreads is supposed to be, however, it should be basically a very low gloss (unless he's oiled his hair, and you don't generally put enough oil or conditioner on dreads to get that sort of shine, because it pulls them apart). Technically, I should have pulled the glossiness/specular values down even more (or kicked up the glossy roughness, but I think that's up to .85 or so already), because that's really a bit too much for that kind of hair. And I probably will later, but I was very happy with that hair the way it came out at that point. I did a preset for it later on that tweaked it down a bit.
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