I also used the green base layer to determine the overall color of the texture. Notice that the empty areas of the texture are filled with a black color; I usually do this to not distract my eyes from seeing the texture everywhere (I just applied a mask with the UVs alphas into the root folder and outside that folder a black layer)(Fig.14).


After that, I used the "brown12” map and repeated it all around the canvas, changed the blend mode to Soft Light, opacity to 60% and changed the Blend option in Layer Styles (I moved the white arrow to the left to preserve only the darkest areas of the map)(Fig.15).


At this point, the texture still looked too uniform, so I used another map to give it more variations; "material06b”, this time from the Total Textures V07:R2 – Sci-fi DVD. I changed the Blend mode to Vivid Light and applied a contrast of 100 (Fig.16). You may be asking why the skin in the render looks a bit red, that is because I was using a SSS map in V-Ray.


Once the texture for the scales was done I started the skin, I used the "red02” map from the Alien Organics DVD and used the same technique of repeating the map all around the canvas. I changed the blend mode to Lighter Color, opacity to 50% and also changed the Color Balance and Brightness just a little bit. Finally, since this map looked a little flat, I used the Burn and Dodge tools to get darker or lighter areas (Fig.17). Note that I made a black mask in the "skin” folder and painted white all the areas of the skin white.


For the mouth, I just made a pink base layer and over it I used the "red07” map on Normal blending mode and 40% opacity, changed the Color Balance and Brightness a little bit and finally, over them, I created a darker pink layer with 25% opacity to unify the map and again used the Burn and Dodge tool in some areas (Fig.18).


Sanlik now had a good texture, but still needed more color variation; he was very plane and basic. So I made a new folder named "Top textures” with a new set of maps that helped me to make Sanlik looks more alive.

I found the map "brown06” very useful for color variations; I changed the blend mode to Color Dodge, 50% opacity and it was perfect to create some yellow areas. I used the same map, but this time in Darker Color, and I got some nice purple dots (Fig.19). To take the skin further I used the "blue08” map in Soft Light to get a delicate variation in the texture. Finally I added some marks in the trunk with the "gray 11” map in Overlay (Fig.20).