Tintmasks and RaceMenu overlays not dark enough? Can't get black warpaint/lipstick, etc.

[DjaySaint]

So I finally got around to making a dark goth type character who I want to use black warpaint and lipstick on (or at least super dark), and I'm running in to an issue with the tintmasks.  So no matter how dark I set the color of any warpaint, I can never get black.  Not even close.  It seems like the tintmasks just blend with the original body texture rather than actually overlay it, so the most I can get is a dark maroon type color which is really awful.

 

Examples:

 

Warpaint color all the way black

Lipstick color all the way black

Warpaint alt skin color

Alternate warpaint (solid color)

Character with normal skin color

Normal skin color with alternate warpaint

 

As you can see in the pictures, the color is set all the way to black with 100% opacity, and the color is more of a darker maroon/brown color.

 

So anyway, what I'm looking for is a way to make the warpaint truly black... well truly *ANY* color I make it really.  Even if I set it to a solid dark green or purple, it still looks like it was just blended with the skin texture rather than overlaying it with a unique color.  I've Googled around for ideas but it has yielded a bunch of what basically amounts to as shrugs and off the wall answers that aren't solutions at all.

 

Is there a way to change the blending mode of tintmasks to overlay the skin texture so it has it's own unique color, rather than just blend with with the base skin texture?  Help would be appreciated, thanks.

[gvman3670]

The second slider down should be all the way to the right side of the scale I believe.

 

Regardless, it will never be totally black (but darker than what you've got here). It will always be kinda' brown and I don't think there's a way to fix this.

Could you perhaps open them up with GIMP or Photoshop and tweak them there? I don't know.

[DjaySaint]

The second slider down should be all the way to the right side of the scale I believe.

 

Regardless, it will never be totally black (but darker than what you've got here). It will always be kinda' brown and I don't think there's a way to fix this.

Could you perhaps open them up with GIMP or Photoshop and tweak them there? I don't know.

 

The second slider (saturation) doesn't make a difference in terms of color when you set the third slider (luminosity) all the way to 0 (black is black).  The third screenshot shows the second slider (saturation) all the way to 100 and it is the same color as the other screen shots where the slider is set to 0.  The ARGB value is still 255:0:0:0 either way.

 

I've also opened up the warpaints in photoshop to take a look, and the solid color ones are full white (100% opacity, with the parts that aren't supposed to be colored black of course), so it isn't a grayscale issue making the tintmasks less opaque.  So there's nothing to really tweak in terms of the actual texture.

 

I have seen some screen shots of people who have totally black warpaint before (Shocky's character is one example), so it has to be possible.  I just don't know how other than making new complexion textures, but then that only works with 1 "warpaint" and you lose said complexion slot.  I also want to put a few tattoos on the body and there isn't enough complexion slots to do 1 for every tattoo/warpaint/lipstick I plan to use.

 

Thanks though.

[blabba]

You cannot possibly achieve true black with tinting. This is because in skyrim vanilla style tintmasks use true black = transparent (no show).

 

Stuff like shocky's and others who show "true black" is because they applied the tattoo directly on the base texture or they have an enb/light setting that shifts the colour spectrum.

 

The only reasonable alternative to doing either of  the 2 mentioned tricks, is to instead of using vanilla style tinting on the face, is to use RM's head overlay option. This would also work since the textures use the alpha channel to define transparency instead of the colour spectrum. However, it comes at a slight performance cost, since now instead of having just 1 combined texture output, you have a copy of the head mesh itself applied with only your overlay mesh. Performance impact should be small for just 1 or 2, but quickly adds up, especially if you use a high poly head replacer.

 

edit: older topic if peeps want some more reading

http://www.loverslab.com/topic/25529-black-warpaint/page-2

[DjaySaint]

You cannot possibly achieve true black with tinting. This is because in skyrim vanilla style tintmasks use true black = transparent (no show).

 

Stuff like shocky's and others who show "true black" is because they applied the tattoo directly on the base texture or they have an enb/light setting that shifts the colour spectrum.

 

The only reasonable alternative to doing either of  the 2 mentioned tricks, is to instead of using vanilla style tinting on the face, is to use RM's head overlay option. This would also work since the textures use the alpha channel to define transparency instead of the colour spectrum. However, it comes at a slight performance cost, since now instead of having just 1 combined texture output, you have a copy of the head mesh itself applied with only your overlay mesh. Performance impact should be small for just 1 or 2, but quickly adds up, especially if you use a high poly head replacer.

 

edit: older topic if peeps want some more reading

http://www.loverslab.com/topic/25529-black-warpaint/page-2

 

Well, I ended up using the RaceMenu overlays.  I converted all warpaint and other tintmask textures I was using to facepaints so if I need to make any super dark or a special color (or glowing) I can at will.  Ended up solving my issue.  Was really simple, but I didn't even think about converting the tints to facepaints until you mentioned the overlays, so thanks a ton.  You helped me obtain what I was looking for.

 

Definitely a massive difference.  Not super true black, but good enough.  I would have to tweak colors/light settings to get it darker at this point, but I like my ENB so I'll leave it as is.

 

Couple progress shots:

 

 

 

(yay glowing warpaint)