before we dive straight into texture painting in blender.
Uh Let's just have a look at a few
simple techniques for drawing wrinkles and skin details.
Uh And to the only,
so first what I did is I took a very soft
brush and I'm kind of indicating the direction of those wrinkles.
And it's very important at that stage that I'm kind of wiggling
my brush a little bit because wrinkles are almost never really straight.
And next some kind of gradually decreasing the size the size of the brush,
making sure that there are smaller wrinkles and also emphasizing decreases.
And next time also
taking a white
rush.
And I'm kind of painting in between those black lines there
when you're doing bump maps.
It is very important, especially when they're organic that
you're not really only,
you know, you're not only
pushing
the surface in, but you're also pulling it out
next.
Some kind of try, I'll kind of try to form a scale pattern here and I'll do that by first
sort of roughing out each scale
by dabbing a bit
with a white brush.
Next I'm going to make that brush smaller
and I'm going to try to paint some black lines around
those white dots.
And of course when you're painting bump maps, um
It's usually a good idea to start from from 50% gray
surface because then everything else that you're doing on top of it.
You know when you're painting black,
you're pushing the surface in basically.
And when you're painting white, you're pulling it out,
trying to emphasize the spaces in between those scales here
and then just brushing over general variation
just with a little bit of black here.
We want to give those scales a little bit of and
energy
sort of shape here. They shouldn't be too round,
but they should also follow the general wrinkle pattern here.
And this process is what pretty similar to what we're going to do next in blender.
We're first going to indicate the direction of wrinkles
along the surface
and then we're going to fill it with detail,
trying really trying to highlight the edges of each scale here.
When you're doing this kind of stuff, especially wrinkles. Um
they don't really curve out that much in the center,
but you also have to kind of emphasize the edges a little bit not everywhere,
not in but in certain places.
So that just makes a bit more natural.
And while I'm actually painting textures, textures like this,
I'm uh I usually have a stack of images next to me or uh
you know, on a separate screen
reference images of
rhinoceros and
elephants and crocodiles. And
now I'm trying to give a bit more variation to the
increases in between the scales. With a little small brush
kind of sketching over the entire area,
deepening
the crease is a little bit in certain places.
Just to make sure that there is some variation to it.
Now, the trick here is to find the balance between
between a lot of variation and uh similarity or uh
regularities because it's too regular,
it's going to look fake
and if it's a
there's too much variation on it, it's just going to look like tree bark.
So I'm kind of on the edge here, it's a bit too much,
it almost looks like a tree at that point.
Mhm.
So for example, here we can try to
sort of paint in a vein, just painting over with 50% gray here,
and we have to
push the edges in a little bit
and then with a smaller white brush, we're gonna
push out the middle part here
and sort of trying to you
make it fit into
the whole concept.
Now I'm sort of
struggling a little line here to make it a bit more
skin, like
adding some of the scales back
and in another area we could
have a scar of some sort.
So I'm kind of
first trying to indicate it with
just grey.
Getting rid of some of some of the detail here,
and then just painting a little bit darker, trying to give it a bit more
irregularity that looks different from the scale pattern that we had there before.
Next I'm highlighting some of the edges here, and we're just going to
push all this,
So all this area in between back
and then we're going to highlight the
the edges,
pull them out a little bit,
we're trying to go sort of against the direction of the skin pattern here
and
we're kind of trying to make it a bit more, you know,
a bit more jagged.
So yeah, later it's going to be the same process
only that we're not
working in two D. Anymore,
but we're actually painting the third dimension.