copy/pasting from a different forum. cos i'm a lazy bum:
hey guys. just wanted to show you a little of what i'm working on.
currently we're mulling about with a customisation system which will hopefully allow players to have a richer gaming experience. in that they can make their own character, and personality etc.
personally i feel this is an important part of a multiplayer experience, from my own point of view, i don't like thinking that i'm not the only guy who looks like me!
with that in mind, the customisation system i'm planning out (note: still in design brief stages), should allow for a pretty diverse system, whereby players can alter things such as skin tone, and eye colour. as well as the shape of various facial features, and even their characters overall proportions (fat/thin etc.) within certain limits.
this post will highlight the skin tone system. the facial structure changes will come later.
here's the custom material:
now, things will change later... the specular map will be part of a texture sheet that combines several different masks. rather than being in the alpha channel of the normalmap. but this was just something to demonstrate certain abilities within UDK.
you'll see that there's a "base" diffuse map, which is largely just to keep generalised colour areas of the face... cheeks are pink, forhead is yellowish, chin is blueish, that kind of thing.
this is then combined with a single colour (masked for intensity), which will give us our end diffuse result.
that result is then inverted (colour only), and multiplied right down for a specular colour value which matches every skin tone generated. which means that we only need a specular map for intensity, instead of colour AND intensity. the colour is generated from the diffuse (makes filesize smaller, among other things).
here are some example skintones generated from that one node. please note, that i'm aware that the darker skin tone looks strange on a guy with very obvious caucasian facial structure.
edit:
because i had an extra 10 minutes, here's that last skintone, but i've moved the verticies around on the mesh (everything else is the same. same UVW map, same normalmap, same diffuse etc.)
this is how the "core" of the customisation system will function once it's all programmed in and working.