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I found that picking out plausible but diverse skin tones for my digital art and game development projects was kind of difficult, and I got curious about if there was a way to define a color space that made it easy.
I've built a color picker and procedural generation algorithm based on the space as well as a bunch of other fun js features and demos throughout the page that use the equations. If you find it interesting, I have lots of explanations of how I built it and what properties the space has.
The methodology might be a bit shaky, but hopefully the result is as helpful for others as I have found it! There's lots of room for improvements (see the Future Work section), but I'm really happy with how it turned out.
Discussion (54 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It seems like some work was done to research existing approaches, but I don't see any reference to Pantone Skin Tones [0]. Without intending to, I've worked on 3 different projects which involved measuring skin tones for makeup applications. The Pantone range is not 100% perfect, but it's pretty well done and easy to understand. There are two axes: a light/dark one, and red-yellow one [1].
[0] https://www.pantone.com/na/en-us/skintone
[1] https://cosmeticsbusiness.com/pantone-skintone-guide-80945
Then, I thought this would stop at using the U-space vectors (the ones that form the basis of the PCA image) and their corresponding ellipse to form our color space, but no, the function fitting is a very slick idea, even if it was executed by hand.
Lastly, I love the presentation of sampling from different r values. Whether you sample from a fixed r value or a range of r values, I bet this has great applications in game design or animation.
I still don't quite get the manual data labeling process at the beginning? It seems like it would encode some bias, but the consistency of the first point cloud and the results certainly speak for themselves.
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10093345/
Once upon a time, I encountered a sort of interactive museum book called "Earthsearch". One of its "exhibits" was a color wheel, made of two spinnable pieces of tinted acetate, that purported to be able to generate any skin tone. I suppose this is three degrees of freedom, since for any position of the two wheels you could access a range of colors around the edge - but the printed page underneath was simply a grayscale gradient, so one degree of freedom was simply luminance.
The book was released in 1994, and was very confident. It even went as far as to encourage the reader to see a doctor, should their skin tone not be achievable! What color model were they using?
But I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the book, but I suspect it was an approximation.
The haemoglobin and melanin are roughly in separate layers of the skin. There is an approximation known as Beer-Lambert that models the skin as two semi-transparent layers. This ignores subsurface scattering, but is roughly correct.
So, in theory two acetate sheets might replicate this. That’s my intuitive opinion. It has been many years since I did this work.
There is a separate effect of increased bilirubin content, that would appear if someone was ill.
People only turn yellow if they have kidney or liver damage. However, some distinctive features like Lucy Liu's natural freckles are tough to draw right.
We looked around a lot for a procedural texture/shader to help make the project characters look less sickly, and please also consider supporting the persons work if you are able:
https://kuhantilope.gumroad.com/l/ultimate-skin
Best of luck =3
I was looking at this a little while ago, and used some of The Pudding's data on makeup/foundation shades (https://pudding.cool/2018/06/makeup-shades/) and plotted it into the Oklab colorspace (https://observablehq.com/@55th/foundation-shades). The shades form themselves into that same crescent as seen in the article.
"Only realistic colors" would be a different problem. And I'm not sure if there's a way to solve that problem without excluding some real colors too.
(Maybe if the colour selector was a different shape? I don't know much about color spaces.)
"not sure if there's a way to solve that problem without excluding some real colors too" - 100% right on that too. A big part of this work was to define a way to tweak/improve the equations in order to approach a solution to these issues - part of my hope in sharing is to get more eyes and brains thinking about this and proposing improvements!
This is a really nice project. Great work and a great write-up. Thanks for sharing.
So even when you get the palette right, to paint it like a believable material in a convincing way is still super hard!
Would love to see this 3-D picker ability in the many character designers out there, instead of the lame 8 swatches or whatever.
The 2.0 “outliers” cover those skin tones.
Masai and some Somali skin tones, similarly, look better represented by the outliers.
The full range of possible human skin tones is perhaps a bit of a challenge for technical colour representation, partly because diffuse reflectance seems to vary so much and that is hard to approximate on screen (e.g. as any website designer could attest, the difference between representing silver and grey is the use of highlights), though the representation of skin tones is a lot better than the early colour film era.
The issue I ran into was what happens when the space moves beyond RGB, but I think the fix is to just add clamps to the end R, G, B values.
Wish I had this on hand like this three or four years ago when I was working on VR avatar software - we had hard-coded skin tone options at the time - would have been a cool addition!
But absolutely the hope is that this is a tool that stays accessible to people for whatever they're building and everyone can slow down on reinventing the wheel here for every character creator/digital art application.
https://kuhantilope.gumroad.com/l/ultimate-skin
https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/mpfb/
https://github.com/alessandro-zomparelli/tissue
ymmv, as some paid plugins actually speed up the funky blender workflow (the auto-Bake plugin by the same author is important for procedural generated textures.)
https://sanctus.gumroad.com/l/SLibrary?layout=profile
Have a great day =3
An albino that consumed too much colloidal silver for years?
but this is just lovely and inspirational work. A unique marriage of hacking in the celebratory sense, thoughtfulness, and meaningful contribution. Outstanding.
There is at least one article published by a technical artist at Pixar who describes modeling a skull within a human scan so that subsurface lighting is more accurately rendered.
I suspect you could combine this with dr_scully’s comment and GolDDranks’ to reach the nuance involved in long tail realism details.
It might be a bit biased though, as there's much more variation on fairer skin tones than on dark ones (there's only one that looks like the colloquial "black").
This contradicts all research and social media from the past decade.