REptile Texture

[slow67]

I vote for option #2

Or should I catch a real lizard and take photo with his body texture?

:thumbsup:

[Ramon]

Either catch a lizard (if you can) or go to the zoo or pet shop and take pictures that way. If you're really desperate, you could buy some reference books on reptiles and scan in different segments of photographs and comp them up to match your model's UVs in Photoshop. This of course, if you are doing it for your own personal project and not going to sell the work due to the fact that those professional photographs are copywritten I'm sure.

[SplineGod]

Id find some books, scan the appropriate pics and use the clone tool in your favorite paint app. Usually the heads of reptiles are the most difficult. The rest of the bodies usually have more regular patterns which are typically easier to recreate.

[leigh]

Or you could be crazy like me and paint everything totally by hand!

I'm working on a dinosaur documentary at the moment, and have been painting the dinosaur skins by hand. The problem with photos is that they have shadows and highlights in them, and the chances of finding reptile photos that are suitable is not likely. This is because their scaley skin has so many lighting artifacts in them that they are generally not suitable for textures.

So I spent a few days painting tiny little scales by hand. The textures actually ended up looking great :)

There was a great tutorial over at NewTeks site, done by Rob Pauza, on painting organic textures, and he used a raptor as the tutorial character. You should check it out - his method is really simple.

[peanut]

Look how this guy does it

its for Maya but he goes and explain the process of making Rep textures


http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=47911

[pblacklock]

you can check out www.doschdesign.com for skin textures. They have impressive images maps and other cool stuff there.

i have bought a bunch of cds from them and i am totally satisfied with the quality and prices of their royalty textures free images for all commercial projects.

later,
Paul

[Ramon]

Originally posted by Leigh
Or you could be crazy like me and paint everything totally by hand!

Leigh is right. That's what I did for my dragon. I looked at several different images of reptiles and painted all my textures in photoshop. (I am also a wildlife artist - fine art with traditional media). Of course custom painting your models takes longer (for me anyways) but, you can really custom fit textures appropriately for your models. Here is a small (under 20k) cropped image of the Dragon i have been working on in my spare time. Notice: the dirt and seperate skin color between scales. I love creating details and nuances.

[RPG2006]

Sorry if this is duplicated

Have a look on www.google.com or maybe try something like www.webshots.com or www.corbis.com. You should be able to find something there.

Leigh, I don't totally agree. I think the tutorial your referring to is excellent, and your method is essential maybe for high detail animated pieces, but scanning and using real textures in alot of cases will suffice. it's certainly worked for us over the years.

I would also suggest steering clear of the clone tool in Pshop. Textures can ended looking like a knitted pullover rather than lizard skin if you aren't careful. What I do is take various parts from photos and paste them into layers so that they are overlapping. If you can get most of the parts from one photo that's best. then use a big fat eraser to erase the edges and blend in.

Also pshop has a the healing brush tool. this is excellent for adding in extra details.

Just my thoughts.

RPG

[limkinkwan]

Well, thanks for advice guy!
Use a real photo and touch up in phothoshop method I think it is easier for me, it seems hard to me if want to paint a very realistic reptile texture in photoshop, but I will try it on in my free time, if there is some tutorial it would be great ! :) :) :)

[leigh]

RPG 2003, I really liked the dinosaur work you did (and even recommended it someone in the General Discussions forum the other day who was looking for 3D dino references), but I had to ask you - how do your dinosaurs look when you go really close up to them? Can you do a render of just the eye area and have it look okay on a television screen?
Just judging by the renders you've got on your site, I would hazard a guess and say no.

Admittedly, my judgment could be impaired because of the Jpeg compression on your images. I personally have a philosophy to always try and make things as hi resolution as possible so that if I want to get close to my creatures, I can. That is why I tend to recommend painting details by hand :)

By the way, I couldn't agree more about the Clone tool. It should always be used really carefully, and never with small to medium sized repeating patterns. It always looks messy.

[Dis]

I use to handpaint them as well, but you absolutely have to get reference images. here´s an example (http://www.realm-of-dis.com/resume/data/dragon_texturprogress.jpg) of a long dead (hd fried) dragon i was working on. not finished but you get the picture. its very much possible and not too complex to draw reptile like skin.

[limkinkwan]

Wa0!! Dis, the texture on the character is very detail, can you explain a bit how you going to draw this in photoshop? take how long to finish it?

[Dis]

phew ! ok let me try to remember a few things.

i know for sure that for many areas, especially the mouth i simply painted black-ish strokes, side by side, and then crossing strokes over them. not in a too linear pattern else all you get is a simple grid. i usually then proceed to play a bit with maximum / minimum over several layers to intensify some parts, and reduce the line thickness on some other parts. it also helps to use a fractalized brush of some sort when drawing those lines.
duplicate a stroke layer, blur the original layer a bit, and keep going until you get a somewhat authentical looking negative bump map. (i should here mention that i start out like many others with a 50% grey background layer.)
then you can simply create a new layer, select the transparency from the stroke layer, invert the selection & feather it, and then start drawing some positive bump value dots / strokes that match up with the negative bumps. i use gaussian blur a lot.

another thing i did (that didnt come out too well in this stage) was to paint a single scale. the scale was white at its tip, and nearly black at its bottom (a gradient-like transition). add some smaller detail and alter the size, and then clone the scale and offset it a bit. works great for bumpmaps (especially displacement maps) in theory, but i didnt quite get the hang of it until my hd crashed. it looked relatively ok at where the horns start, but horrible at the area between his nose & eyes. i guess there is a lot of uv stretching as well.

the color map was based off the bump map mainly, but stay away from just painting dark colors where the bump is dark and vice versa, the color map usually deserves a little more variation and detail, whilst respecting the bump map. one thing i would love to do is to give each scale a slightly different hue, rather than just a hue-blurred color overlay for all scales.

at this point i didnt even paint a diffuse map and i think i just used a bump-modified spec map to see where this is going. the diffuse map should, whilst also keeping an eye on the bump map rather define where light hits the model in a larger scale. same for specularity, although this one needs to respect most (if not all) of the bump details as well.

time, well, i think i spend ...roughly.. 3-4 hours on his maps to this stage, including a lot of trial and error.

hope that helps you a bit.

oh, and hey - if anyone donates a $1000 so i can recover the data on my hd, ill send the psd for free :thumbsup:

[limkinkwan]

Yeah! many many thanks Dis, it giV me the idea right now, it looks cool ! :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

I giV you $1000000.00, and you do everything for me, hahahaha..joke!:scream:

[RPG2006]

Leigh,

Sorry for not replying earlier, been ultra busy. It's about 4.00 in the morning here, so am a tad sketchy.

Thank you, first off, for the referral Leigh, much appreciated.

Take all of what you are saying on board, I agree for your usage that originating maps etc from scratch is the way to go. Especially if there are to be good closeups. I have a few shots I downloaded of jurassic park maquettes, triceratops and trex, and even though there's a bit of fantasy regarding their accuracy, the hand scultped textures I think are excellent.

Regarding our stuff, in fact the originals are 300 dpi as they are for print. Not all necessarily that large in dimensions, but we blew a few of them up to A0 and mounted them on boards, sometime ago, and they held up pretty well. Obviously we have plenty of room for cheating, or retouching afterwards. So for a closeup of a head we would take it so far in 3d, and then add extra details and what not in post. A luxury that obviously you don't have with animation. A luxury we don't usually have is time.

I know you are a very busy individual yourself, but have you considered doing a tutorial of your own on texturing critters some time?

Also I'm intrigued to know, when we will get a chance to see some of your work.

Cheers

RPG

:)

[leigh]

Hi there :)

Thanks for the info, I was pretty curious :) It is indeed a pity how often time contraints force us to take shortcuts when taking the long route is usually the most fun.

Yep, I would definitely do a tutorial one of these days, I'm just so busy - I'm finishing off my texturing book as we speak, just a few days to go now.

Funny, I am actually considering doing a dino texturing tutorial, I just don't have a model of one right now (the ones I am working on for the documentary belong to the studio, unfortunately).

I'll show some of the dinosaurs I am working on as soon as (and if) I can get permission.

Sorry I didn't reply earlier to this thread, I've been having MAJOR internet problems over the last 24 hours.

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