Images of my customized metahuman skin shade setup In unreal 5.6 from my blog. The idea behind this setup is to neutralize the mid tones of the skin to provide a base that is better accepting of a wider range of tints, while still maintaining depth of color and value. This paired with Melanin maps allows for a very broad and customizable range of skin tones values and saturations that feel plausible and alive. Another purpose of this test was to try and achieve extremely realistic an plausible breakup of the skin tones in key areas to allow for darker skin tones to feel rich and realistic as opposed to the old school flat color multiply that has been a mainstay for years.

This method was gleaned from a brief description of the process Arno Schmitz GDC talk a few years back on how the background character for Horizon: Forbidden West were textured. They had some of the most beautiful dark skinned characters I had ever seen and I wanted to create my own version of this tech. This is all Game resolution textures and running without any exceptional lighting setup, with only a few minor optimizations and changes to the base metahuman Material to consolidate some texture channels to make room for the melanin mask.

Hope you like it! Better descriptions of the process in my blog
https://woogity.artstation.com/blog

Needs no Introduction, but here is the portfolio from the man himself. The talk is currently in the GDC vault.
https://www.artstation.com/arno