advanced creature texturing?

[leigh]

Overall your work just needs more detailing, especially the sort of subtle details you get in nature. Study more photos from nature and base your textures on those. Right now, your textures have quite a generic, hand-painted feel to them which isn't very realistic. Blending photos into your textures is the best way to improve realism. And remember that you can often use photos of non-organic surfaces to enhance organic ones; for example, blending some good quality photos of dirt and even concrete into those skin maps would add loads of high frequency details which would improve your overall level of detail and realism. Don't be afraid to experiment. Your UV map on the alligator could also be improved, as there is quite a lot of stretching going on in there.

Unfortunately I don't know of any tutorials to recommend, however since it's clear that you understand the basics of texturing, all you really need to improve is practice.

[ryu48]

thank you for your reply.
well thats just an early wip ... i have already improved the variety of the colours ... i was just too lazy to make a new render.
here is another wip of the crocodile with constant shading to see the colours better: http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/1922/sjfjkdgk.png
i used some nice bone and metall textures.
the dinosaur will get a complete rework soon.

and looks like there is really no great tutorial about texture painting ... well i will keep practicing then.

btw did you work at framestore?

[leigh]

Yeah I used to work at Framestore.

That's definitely looking better, and yeah it's much easier to see textures in constant shading. You've definitely improved the details and realism, so keep pushing your work in that direction and you should be fine! One tip I can offer based on that last image is for the scales/bumps - you have them defined as dark lines in your colour map. Try altering that in places, so that in some spots, the lines are light instead. Just clip a masked Levels adjustment or something like that to the layer (provided it is, indeed, on its own layer). It's subtle variations like that which really push the realism to a new level.

[ryu48]

oh thats awesome!
i love framestores work!
because of them i even decided to start cgi.


That's definitely looking better, and yeah it's much easier to see textures in constant shading. You've definitely improved the details and realism, so keep pushing your work in that direction and you should be fine!

thank you im very glad to hear that from someone like you!
and thanks for your tip - well i already got some tips about that from a supervisor of framestore.
i will try to put these light cracks in the reworked version of my dinosaur.
but not for the crocodile since the lines of the scales come from the reference images i used for it.
i think that work is unnecessary since the scales are quiet large and the shadows of them would cover these cracks in most cases.
but for the raptor i will definitely do that even though it will be alot of work!

[PrayingMantis]

I'm really interested in this kind of information, I found it hard to get my hands on some good organic texturing workflow.
Most of the time it's about human skin, but for fantasy creature it's kinda hard.

I got a DvD from gnomon where it was supposed to learn you to show you how to texture a Megalodon teeth, and what he is doing is scanning the teeth and stamping the texture on the model.
How do you scan a banshee from avatar?

I know that you have to use several "photo" and blend them together, but my problem is about this blending.
I think that it the basic technique that could help.

Are you just retouching the color in photoshop of a cool photography with pattern you like in photoshop and then use it on your creature?

The creature on this thread are really great, I don't even think if I'd be able to do the same.
Neil Blevins DvD on hard surface texturing is awesome, the 2 part DvD with the theory first and then the practical exercice really rocks.

There is any kind of good material about that, or we just have to experiment (which I do) on our side?

[oglu]

ryu48 if uploaded some aligator pics here... maybe you like to use them...
http://area.autodesk.com/mudlife/stencils?tf=7&where=3&mudlife_catg=301&x=53&y=8

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