Hello everyone, this is my first post on the Unity forums 
I started with a private project around 2 months ago. So i’m pretty new to all of this.
I’m just testing in a prototype scene to see how different things are done.
Right now I’m working on the character custimization part. So clothing, armor but also character creation.
The clothing and armor are done by splitting up the character into 4 pieces (head, torso, arms, legs, plus probably the hair) and then stitching the right ones together. This works well so far.
Now for the real question. First I modeled the character in one piece to make a texture for the naked body (in Substance Painter). The naked body parts of the 4 pieces will then share the same texture (because reusing one texture is better than to create a different “skin” texture everytime for every armor piece right?). But now i’ve run into a problem and i think it’s a conceptual misunderstanding.
If i want to make the characters face customizable, how would i do that?
Wouldn’t it make sense to have a separate texture for the face? (I believe so)
How would I achieve small changes made to the face, like changing the lip color for example?
Is this done with mapping 2 textures, changing a texture on the fly, with second maps or maybe something i never heard of?
Every input is much appreciated.
Shape is commonly changed by sliders that drive morph/blend shape adjustments.
Although Im not experienced with shaders beyond a need to know basis, the example you provided is controlled by having a base albedo and different masks to allow color changing for specific areas of the face.
Beyond creating this customizability - I can not say how the final textures/shaders are authored to be effecient at run time.
Thank you for your input!
Okay so if i’m using the lux standard metallic shader for my skin as a shader right now, i would have to copy that shader and extend it with different possible greyscale mask textures combined with a tint color? Is that correct?
So something like that? http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Masked_Tint
This way i would have a generic shader which i could use for all my characters and i could change the color at any time in the game. Sounds pretty useful to me 
What about the approach of creating the final face texture on the fly. I mean i could create a greyscale mask for the “lip region” and change/save the final texture with a script. Is this in theory the same solution as above but only slower and not as flexible?
Thanks again. If i have a solution i’m gonna post it here.
Implementation will have to be tested/prototyped.
Sounds like you are on the right track. Good luck, update thread when you have something to show. 