Discrepancy between default skin in MH and Blender

[blindsaypatten]

This is just a question: would it make sense for the appearance of the default skin in MH to be closer to how it appears when exported? My guess is that the default shader is taking its color from a litsphere of the color it appears in MH. That's what it looks like in the material editor. But I notice that if I set a skin texture and go to the material editor the litsphere sphere looks like it has been colored with the actual default color that one sees on export or under some of the other shaders. So, would it make sense to change the default litsphere to match the default color? Or change the default color to match the litsphere?

It just doesn't seem right that the default appearance is so different when exported.

Probably everyone sets a skin before exporting so probably not a high priority, but still, I don't see any advantage to the current state.

Also, can I suggest a lower value than .96 for default shininess? I can't imagine that many people want a really shiny toon. 0.5 at most I would say. Just takes an edit of defaultSkin.

[RobBaer]

My guess is that the default shader is taking its color from a litsphere of the color it appears in MH. That's what it looks like in the material editor. ?

It just doesn't seem right that the default appearance is so different when exported.

I may be missing some of what you are doing, so ignore me if this is unresponsive. Yes, the MH viewport is using the litsphere when litsphere is checked in the material editor. If you choose phong, your skin will look quite similar to its Blender version. You can tweak settings to your heart's content and save a phong version of the skin material for MH.

[blindsaypatten]

I saved a phong shaded material from the material editor and if I then select that material as a skin it works as expected, except that without an image texture the render tab on the rendering tab uses the texture image not found skin, as does the quick render, although the advanced render does. It seems odd that it displays correctly on the other tabs, such as the modeling tab, but not on the render tab.

But we already knew we could create our own skin materials. My point is that it seems odd that by default the model is colored a different color than the exported color and the color in the advanced render. One would expect that the quick render and advanced render would render the same color of toon, just with different quality.

Quality render colors (top) and Quick render colors (bottom), for Caucasion (left) and African (right) models

If the default litsphere was the same color as the export/advanced render color then this discrepency wouldn't occur.

Given that the litsphere changes color between the Caucasian and African settings I'm assuming that you can set the litsphere color as you like, and you could set it to match the quality render/exported color.

Not everyone shares my strong conviction that you shouldn't have to change the settings from the default values in order to get an expected result, such as the quick render and advanced render rendering the same color, so I leave it up to you whether it is worth changing.