Basic Skin Texture Editing in Daz and others

I made a little video that show a little bit of what I do to some of my characters. It contains 3d nudity, which probably isn't a surprise to you if you follow me, but I'll still give you this warning.

In the video, I use GIMP 2.9 to remove "underboob shadow" from a character. This is something many textures have, but can be annoying when you want a smaller or very perky breasted character. This is done by using the "Heal Tool" in GIMP. Other programs may have different names for this. Basically, Heal is similar to the Clone Tool, but instead of overwriting all the pixels, Heal tries to blend those pixels in for more natural look. This tool is fantastic for all sorts of things, like removing blemishes in personal photos. Or adding in blemishes, freckles and other features to a plain skin texture.

If you need to know where the textures are, one way is to load your figure in Daz, and click on the "Surfaces" section. Find any of your skin elements, and let your mouse hover over any section that has a picture, like opacity. This should give you the file path. I recommend saving a backup of these textures before altering them. You can easily make a backup folder and leave it right in the folder where your textures are, this wont hurt Daz, and you'll always know where they are as they are still in your character's texture folder. You can see my backup folder in my video.

Once you have your textures, you can find the Heal Tool, and I normally set the opacity to around 75% or so. This allows for more blending. Some textures may work better with lower opacity. In the video, I drop the opacity below 50% on the shader maps and the normal map. Hit CTRL+ left mouse to mark the spot you want to copy. Go to your trouble area and hold down the mouse button to start the healing process. It may take a few passes to get what you want. Some textures are easier and some are harder.

The main texture is your main goal here. You might be able to get away with leaving the others alone, depending on the character and what you are doing with it. I also like to make the pixel area of the tool as large as I can to make it faster, and this can also help the blending effects. Just pay attention to where the original area is as you trace over, if you run over strong features, like moles or the nipple, these will be copied, too. So you may need to go back and patch these spots. The shader textures can be less picky, but can make a difference in a close up shot. If the character has a normal map, you want to see if it is smooth or not in that area. If it has a crease for underboob, that WILL show up in your renders, and look very odd. I turn off normal maps a lot anyway because that helps my PC render faster.

This video also shows a bit of the magic that Iray Converter for Genesis 2 can do. She looks ok before I use it, but after I use it, you can see a big difference. This tool works like this for most skins I have tried, including many of my more recent characters (Akae, Alex, Ainsley, Alyson, to name a few.) This character is a V4 character by Addy called Syrah, that has had its skin textures and head morph converted to G2F. The body is base G2F, and I use the Breast Gone morph to show the shadow. At the end of the video, I show her with Breast Gone at 100%, Breasts Small at 100%, and Ysabeau Breasts at 65%.

I tend to use the base figure of G2F or G3F whenever I want to create a small or flat chested character. Instead of using a full body morph, I dial in separate morphs for different body parts. The reason for this is that most of those body morphs do not work well with Breast Gone or other small breast morphs. So in general, it is better to keep the chest close to the base model if possible. There are some exceptions, but not many.

This video is unlisted.
I hope this helps anyone looking to do some simple texture editing.
I am by no means any kind of expert and I probably never will be, so there could be better methods. This is just what I figured out myself. I used this method to edit textures for characters in Skyrim back in the day, which always had horribly painted on shadows. I never uploaded any mods, if anyone is wondering.