Texturing

Texturing was pretty easy on this piece. I made some overpaint tests in Photoshop, trying to decide how the alien should look. I decided to make his head realistic, like human skin, and his brain a little bit awkward and translucent.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what his uniform should look like. I tried different colors and materials. The green you can see in the final image is something I settled on about a week before finishing him; until then he was in a simple white dress.

For texturing the skin, I used a great hand-painting approach taken from Scott Spencer's book about ZBrush. To start I polypainted skin temperatures (red areas around the mouth, blue around the eyes, and yellows where the bones are close to the skin). Then I painted a "mottling” pass, which is something like the fiber structure under the skin. Then came the veins and finally I blended everything using a neutral skin color. You can see the results in Fig.09.


The alien's skin surface and all the details were generated from the final ZBrush sculpt (Fig.10). I also rendered out a Cavity map to add detail to the textures.



The rest of the scene is pretty simple in terms of texturing. The toy box was unwrapped and completed in Photoshop; the rest was done using photo textures and basic planar mapping for adding detail or cubic mapping for procedurals. The composition of some of the textures can be seen in Fig.11.