At last, here’s a new update of my innkeeper character.
Again, it took a little longer than I had expected since my last update, but I’ve had a few commissioned pieces of work that have come in between. Believe it or not, but they take precedence over my personal projects. Anyway, today I got back in business with this guy again, and here’s the latest snapshot of his current state.
First Texturing Pass on The Innkeeper
I’ve entered the texturing and shading phase. Since the last post I’ve created the UV’s for him and then spent most of the time building a decent skin shader. The texture maps used at the render above is just some rough placeholders I sketched out quickly to have something to work with when the skin shader reached the final stages. The color map is pretty wild and I’ll remake it from scratch for the next update, and other than that I used a simple normal map to get some structure going on. I’ll remake that one as well.
The skin shader though, am I pretty happy with now. It consist of a large node network built up around 2 SubSurface scattering shaders, 1 OrenNayar shader, 1Blinn shader, 1 Reflection shader and everything mixed together with some mixer nodes and gradients. I’ve tested this shader pretty carefully and it seems to hold up in most lighting environments.
I wanted to get this shader perfect before starting to work with the texture maps for real, so well, here I am. I have a photo session I need to do this weekend for a totally unrelated project, but other than that I think I’ll have enough time to start working on the real textures and post another update shortly.
Working Music: Babyshambles – Shotter’s Nation
Again, I’m impressed.
How do you go about starting your texture maps? Texturing is certainly not my forte, and the node editor may as well be in latin right now (and no, I don’t speak latin). I got the Alban/Warner Essential LW 9.0 book and I’m slowly getting through it. I heard it has a section dedicated to the node editor, which I am very excited to read.
Keep up the good work. I’m excited to see how this progresses.
Hey,
Thanks for the interest.
About starting my texture maps, basically I start with baking out an occlusion map to have as a guide in Photoshop together with the UV layout, and then start working with the texture layers from there.
I’ll try to make my next post a bit more detailed and try to describe my texturing process more thoroughly together with how I work with the node editor. Probably around the middle of this week, and hopefully there will be some useful stuff there to get inspired or adapt from. :)
Incredible work! I’ll be following it as well. And again, I’ll post some of your work on KSPR-Perspective Radio’s Blogcalls and maybe drive people here so they can see the rest.
Renato