Texturing

Before going back to ZBrush, I had to make UVs in order to texture my head later on. I did a simple unwrap in modo. With this new clean mesh I went back to ZBrush to project all the details of my original design onto my new mesh. You can simply do this by clicking the magical "Project All” button. All you need to do is select your original mesh, have your new mesh as a subtool of it, subdivide this subtool until you have approximately an equal amount of polygons as your original mesh. You are now ready to click the "Project All” button!

Once I had most of the details of my original design on my new mesh with UVs, I could start thinking about texturing. I really wanted to achieve a pale look, so I knew it was gonna be quite a challenge to get the skinshader right. For the colormap, I started painting from a high-res image that I'd downloaded from 3D.sk (which I really recommend if you are serious about character modeling and texturing).

Rendering

Since I was using Maya's SSS fast skin, there was also need for a subdermal or epidermal map to create subsurface scattering. The subdermal layer is the middle layer and simulates the red glowy effect. To create a subdermal color map you need to saturate your diffuse map and give it an extra reddish tint. The epidermal layer is the top layer of our skin, so this needs to much more desaturated (Fig.04).


With all my texture maps sort of finished, I started tweaking the sss skin shader to get the look I had in mind (Fig.05). After a lot of trial and error, I got something I could live with (Fig.06).

Conclusion

I hope this overview made some sense. Forgive me for not digging deeper in every aspect, but I wanted to give more of an overview of my workflow, which works very well for me. Finding a workflow that suits you can take while, but is very important. I am now working on some full body characters with this same workflow and it's going pretty smooth. For some more work please visit http://delavega.cgsociety.org/gallery/ or you can always contact me on

Thank you for your time, and thanks to 3DTotal for the support!
Cheers