Next-gen skin painting tutorial??

[Mattimusss]

I was just curious if anyone knew where i could find a next-gen skin painting / material tutorial that applys mainly towards game models? I have the general idea down on how to paint in photoshop but i'm looking for some more direction with creating all the little details.. anyone got advice? thanks.

[Mattimusss]

Ok, just so you guys have an idea of what i'm trying to accomplish here. This is the guy i'm wokring on... sorry about the small pic, but my photobucket account always shrinks my sh!t.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v733/eastofchicago/midshot.jpg

[Frozan]

im not sure but dude this is night and day work here. this guy is lookin pretty cool now with textures to him. reminds me of RAGE by ID software.

[coupes.]

Ancient-Pig does some of the best skin textures out there. Lucky for us he took some time a while ago to whip up this great tutorial (http://www.pig-brain.com/tut01/tut01_01.htm) which shows a great way to paint your textures in photoshop.

Hope this helps, and thanks to Ancient-Pig.

[cookepuss]

It is a nice one. I think that what it emphasizes best is that the key to a good skin texture starts with a good knowledge of the underlying skeleton and wrinke zones. He points that out quite nicely when he starts marking off the "landscape".

I think that, as games art starts blending in more and more with higher poly work, you're going to find this sort of skin question over and over and over. In the coming years, better hardware is going to handle more complex HW pipelines, which is going to put a great deal of work on the shoulders of those writing shaders and doing textures. Just look at how much effort a high poly artist goes through to create a convincing skin shader. That alone can keep you occupied for a while, as it has to work perfectly in conjunction with the individual channel textures.

Mattimusss, I like your model. I think that your skin texture (obviously) needs some more work. The keys to a convincing skin are variation, noise, and apparent depth.

The first two are easy enough to get. Skin is never evenly toned. Between wrinkles, spots, veins, and shifts in pigmentation, the skin is very rarely one color. Never actually. It's always shifting, but ever so slightly. As far as depth goes, I usually achieve this by doing stuff like baking in my ambient occlusion to get that extra dirty deep look. I'm a great fan of using baking tools so I also like to get some of my illumination and surface shading baked in. Provided you have a good lighting setup, you can really get some details that are very hard to get from a painted texture. You can nicely build in a GI look to your textures and add zero cost to your texture budget.