Texturing

After the long fight with texturing hair and abandoning it, I moved on to texture the top, as it was the simplest shape, which made it the best one for learning how the program actually works. For the texture I used knitwear which I scaled to be really small so it looks like a plain cotton top. I was so happy with the material and how it all works that the demotivation from hair texturing was quickly gone and I was ready to learn how to create textile stitches. The best tutorial for that was about texturing leather (link here). This taught me how to work with brushes and all the elements of the fill layers such as height, roughness, and metalness.

After putting it into Marmoset I was able to see it work quite well as a test, but the top still needs creases. I learned which textures I need to export and where they belong in marmoset to achieve a good look of each textured mesh. Most of the time I have worked with the base colour, normal map, metalness, roughness/glossiness, ambient occlusion, and sometimes with transparency (for the hair and eyes) or emission (for glowing parts of boots and belts).

I created the creases in ZBrush but unfortunately, I do not have any screenshots during that part of the process however I have evidenced the same thing below with the jeans. After baking the high poly model with creases on the low poly model in Substance painter, I gave it the same smart material, but this time I chose a lighter colour and white stitches for the seams. I am very happy with the final look of the top and as much I was scared of Zbrush, I found out it is actually a really good tool for creating details such as these seams, which wouldn't be possible to do without sculpting.

And here we can see how I made the fabric creases on the jeans! To be honest, creating fabric creases was a very difficult task for me as I still have problems to understand how to crease fabric even when I am trying to draw it! So I was pleasantly surprised with what I was able to achieve, most of the creases look very natural, even though there are some small details I would further revise given more time to polish this process! As a reference, I used my own jeans so I was sculpting with a big mirror next to me, jumping up to see how it creases on different parts of my body and I can say it was very helpful. I can compare it to life drawing vs. drawing from photos, but this time probably even more useful as I needed the trousers from all sides and no photos would have been able to provide it. This way I was able to touch the real creases and examine why and how the fabric folds itself on all parts of my hips and legs even when I was moving. Understanding real life from observation always leads to the development of art skills and this experience just proves it.

For texture, I used denim smart material and I dyed it dark grey. I added seams which I learned during texturing the top and I also created a silver button following the second part of the tutorial about leather (link here). I think it would look even better if the texture had more height to make it look rougher but this was as much as it allowed me to.

While texturing boots I learned how to create glowing textures, following a tutorial (link here). It was fun to work with glow and I used the same technique to create the belts too. For the darker part of boots, I used artificial skin texture but in my opinion, it was always either too shiny or not shiny enough and I somehow couldn't find the right balance. I tried to find a better material for it but despite the issues I had with it it still worked the best.

Here we can see the first skin texture test, where I played with smart materials and it's height. I really like the light in the text render scene but it still looked kinda artificial and plastic.

For the actual skin texture, I created details of lips, hands, and added a little bit of noise to the skin in ZBrush. After baking it, used skin smart material and then painted different blue, yellow, and red shades on the top of it to make it look more alive. Human skin is very colourful but the colours need to be subtle otherwise it wouldn't look good.

It took a few hours to get to the final result but I can say I am very happy with the look of the skin as it is the most realistic texture I have managed to achieve. All the colours are perfectly balanced, the general skin tone is also well chosen, not overly pink, red, or yellow, which often happens as colours can look a bit differently in substance painter and in a renderer. At first, I was also worried it would look very patchy or not textured enough but I have created the perfect balance between them. The time spent on it was worth it and definitely motivated me to continue working.