first let me show you how I take a reference image and turn it
into a stencil texture that I use later for adding more skin details.
So I took this image and I made it gray scale
and uh the first thing that I have to do is remove all the lighting information from
it because it's uh it's a photo that's
been taking out in nature or whatever whatever.
And uh
well there was a light shining added and for a bump maps and textures in general,
we want to make sure that uh all the lighting information is gone from our
from our photos.
So I took
a soft brush with a light gray color
and first I'm just highlighting each of the scales here
and I made a copy here to kind of patch up this area.
I'm not doing anything too fancy with the layers here.
I'm uh I'm just emerging everything into onto one layer and just painting over it
and to patch up these themes here.
Now I only really want the structure of this whole thing.
I'm actually going to remove some of the details on it
because at a certain point,
if there's too many details in your reference images or in
your stencil it's just going to add noise to your,
to your overall overall texture map.
And uh yeah generally you want to remove some of
that detail and if it's necessary added back in later,
again just taking a light gray color and I'm gonna try and make all the scales uniform
as uniform as possible
and I'll probably just take the middle part of this image as uh as a stencil
blender really has a great system for uh for adding these
types of textures to your texture and painting with them.
And
in the lower part
I'm also trying to even out some of the lighting there. So I have to make all this
stuff a bit brighter
And I'm just going to take a 50% gray
and uh sort of brush along the edges of my image
just to make sure that later on I don't accidentally uh draw the corners of my image
over my texture.
Just that's just a little precaution here.
And this type of stencil texture is really great for you know,
for adding details that you build on.
Uh We're not gonna obviously slap everything onto our model,
we're just going to take
certain parts of it at one part here, at one part there.
So
I took it, I took a picture that
you know, has some variation to it. It has some curves and
I can take different parts from it
because all my model and my the surface details also going to be very curved.
There's all these spikes and horns and
Uh huh.
So I figured it would be good to have some kind of circular pattern
then I can use
trying to transfer some of these scales over here
and sort of making the pattern a bit more uh
and adding a bit more transition between those patterns
because we might be able to use that
and highlighting some of the scales here to make them push out of it more.
And as I said, most of the detail gets lost at this stage. Well, not that much.
It's uh still since we're rushing over this faintly, it's still going to be there.
But
well, just make sure that
that we don't accidentally add a noise later on.
Especially when we're using a larger version of this image to brush over uh
a larger portion of the skin.
All right, this is all looking good.
We removed all the lighting information now
more or less and we can just go back into blender now and use this as a stencil texture.