Material Nodes for Skin and Hair

I have had many questions from both inside and outside of DA on how I setup my materials for Pepper girls. I hope this clears things for everyone — or maybe it opens up a new can of worms — I dunno 😂 but here it is.

Like I tried to describe this many times before, the material nodes on Unreal Engine work specifically for Unreal Engine and it’s versions, I don’t know how much help this would be for any other node based system out there.
This setup is from 4.27, but works the same from 4.25 upto the latest.

There are two hair material versions at the top, since the older (and at this point more stable) hair card versions require different shader properties from the strand based hair models.
The strand based model is super heavy on the machine for all of the dynamic calculations enabled for realistic hair simulations, but the shader for it is more lighter.
Altho, to control it fully, you need to do some wild tricks and understand, that you are essentially adding melanin and redness values to the hair strands. Still figuring out more controls for this shader.

Skin shader for Pepper girls is divided in two parts, the head and the body. It was necessary to chop them in half, since my machine can’t handle 8k textures for the details at this point.
These are 4k textures and with the current shader grouping logic, this allows me to place ten characters to one scene (with hair card models) and render them real time.
Haven’t tested with any larger amount, but currently no need, so I should be safe from system crashes for now.

The skin shader for Pepper girls is bit more complex than one would normally need, since I’m going for real time editor modifications with the shader, so I can change some features while I’m animating or creating new looks for them.
Thus far I have been able to add color masks for lips, nails, eye shade, and skin tone.
You could add as much of them as you like, but I’m good with these options currently.
All of these shader functions are set to work with the basic Pepper Character BluePrint is a different animal all together and I won’t touch that in this post. If you guys want I can make another post about that, if you are interested in this sort of stuff.
Let me know, on the comments below or by dm’s like before.

Peace (of)
Pepper