human + dragon skin

[leigh]

I think the most important thing you need to work at is variation :)

For instance, the bump map on the face is too constant - look at a human face and you will see a lot more details than just the grain of the skin. Add wrinkles around the eyes, corners of the mouth and such. Also, vary the actual size of the grain in these sort of areas too.

You also need to ensure that all the maps correlate correctly to one another. For example, you've added some bump spots to the top of the head, but the colour there is the same. A mole not only raises the skin slightly, it should also be a darker colour.

Any detail that appears in one of your image maps will also affect all the others in some way.

The bump map on the ears should be smoother, as the skin on ears does tend to be a lot smoother in general.

As for the dragon, you really should vary the size of the cellular grain a lot more. It is far too uniform. Take a look at this tutorial (http://www.lightwave3d.com/tutorials/surface/raptor/index.html) that Rob Pauza did of the raptor he made in one of the earlier CG Talk challenges, and have a look at how the size of the bumps on his raptor varies.
Especially around the eyes, notice how it gets smaller.
Details like that make the character a lot more interesting :)

Another thing that would be cool is to make a gloss map around the eyes to make those areas appear slightly watery. It's always a nice touch ;) It would also look cool if the areas around the nostril looked a bit wet too.

Also notice how Rob Pauza's raptor colour map has so many variations in it. The different colours in it's skin are fantastic, and I think that a similar kind of variation of greens and browns here would work very well.

You seem to have some minor stretching problems in your UV maps too, which you should fix.

[hannibar]

Thanks Leigh.
This should keep me going for a while. :)

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