He's already said he creates custom skin textures in photoshop. Maya's skin is just a custom texture, because no skin texture in DAZ has such a sharp height map. It feels like he overdid the height map and that's why it's so sharp.
Nope, nope and not at all. He doesn't create textures for characters models. For assets - yes. Maya skin texture is default for one of the models. Yes, he could make her look "smoother" by reducing the bump map values and other stuff.
He probably created custom textures for all characters, or at least most of them, which is why their skin is shiny. He overdid it again, this time with the roughness map, which makes Sage's skin shine like she's been slathered in cream.
Nope and nope. Sage was "shiny" only at Halloween party. It's obvious that is was a moisturizer or something like that. She did it on purpose. Other characters go "shiny" when they are sweaty - gym, sex, fever, etc.
Any change at the current point will ruin the previous 10 episodes. Skin is not the thing that human may change. So it will look ridiculous and not plausible. He didn't have to change the texture itself, it was enough to reduce the values for bump and displacement maps etc.
And again. If you take a look at the people around you and if you start taking pictures or photos of their skin from a short distance, you will realize that Maya's skin is better than most people around have. The problem is the contrast. The rest of the characters got the "perfect" skin. If everyone had such detail and minor flaws as Maya have, it would be perceived differently. But what's done is done. I don't think anything will change until the very end of the game. Perhaps in the remaster (if it sees the light), he will change something.
Magazines with photoshopped pictures, as well as, for example, Instagram with its filters, have taught us and made us used to see things differently.
Regarding her hands (especially), this is well reflected and makes sense after what we learned in EP10. She is used to housework, to caring for her sick mother, it is not a problem for her to remove something unpleasant from the floor, while many shy away from it, as if it were nuclear waste. Her childhood was harsh, literally.
Tell me about it. I’m a man in my 50s who worked manual labor for a lot of years, and my hands look better.
It doesn't work this way. Women have more delicate hands and skin. From an early age to ~ 18 years old, the body "grows". And any hard work, detergents, and so on will later manifest themselves in how the hands will look. It also depends on the skin itself. It's one thing when you have a scheduled cream in the morning and at night and you don't do anything around the house or do some little things, what everyone usually does. And it's another thing when instead of creams your hands constantly covered with detergents for the floor, plates, laundry, cleaning and so on all day your hands are constantly wet. Trust me, in a few years your hands will look the same, if not worse.
