Male Body Types have something Missing

Craket

So ive been making this new dragon character, but...

I turned the AO down to 0.5 in order to better showcase these Seams. Its the dark arms, legs and head. I did everything in the outliner to see what this could be, tried disabling all layers, investigating all masks etc. Fiddling with material handlers, Deleting all parts and appendages. I did everything to get rid of these odd dark areas and they were still there. Maybe the lit areas is actually the issue?

I do not remember when these appeared. It was hard to see as I was editing in Celestial looking at his front. Light seems to hide it well, as soon as you have a dark area like in Nature, they are more easily seen especially with AO set to 0.5. It may have something to do with light/shadow graphical settings messing up due to either AO, material handler or whatever. But even with reseting everything back to 0, I could still see them. I will continue to fiddle around, PM me if you want a download to investigate yourself if you want to investigate.

-----------Further Fiddling---------

Changing sizes does not interfere with the issue, it scales with the model perfectly.

When almost everything, and setting everything back to the default as possible except for the AO and one FILL layer, I tried switching body types.

M_athletic (Original)

F_athletic

M_default

M_muscular

Only MALE models seem to have this issue, All other Female models do not.

M_Athletic 100%

M_Athletic 0%

Opening up a new character, using a MALE body type results in the same issue

Although, I am not sure how my character gets to make them look even darker, but I suppose its not the dark that is the issue, but the lack of it.

odes

Good find. I have investigated the issue and know what's causing it.

So it's not actually male vs female that's causing it, but rather flatchested. We're using a separate normal/ao/thickness map for flatchested, that is blended onto the character (according to a mask) when flatchested is used. (Since male body types automatically apply flatchested, this issue becomes instantly noticeable.)

(The reason the areas look different is because of this mask, which is different for each body type.)

There are three issues:

1. The base and flatchested normal_ao_th maps don't seem to be baked in the same way, causing undesirable differences.
2. The flatchested normal_ao_th map is not affected by AO or thickness layers. (This is a tricky one to fix as the texture builder system was not designed with having multiple normal maps present.)
3. The mask for bt_m_athletic flatchested is probably busted and needs fixing.

Thanks for bringing this issue up. I'll try to think of a solution to the 2nd problem. (The first and third ones are dogson's area. I have forwarded this thread to him and also suggested what he should do about it.)

Craket

Nice, I hope its not too much of a bother fixing bugs in general.