I laid out the uvs for this character using mostly basic planar projections and the "relax" tool in xsi. The idea was to use as much of the map as possible and not waste too much resolution. Then I stamped my map out at a resolution of 4000 px.
Painting Textures:
I painted all my textures from scratch in Photoshop I began with a bump map.(50% grey first) by painting this one first I could test with no color how the light reacted to the surface of my creature. The next map was the color map which I began by blocking in all my tonal values and color and completing it by matching it with my bump map and pushing the detail. Finally came the specular map which defines how areas of the surface reflect light , this map is mostly black with a very high contrast.
Lighting:
After trying many different solutions such as hdri, final gather and global illumination I felt that they all took extremely long to render. So I went with a simple solution using a 5 point light which looks something like this, when it comes to lighting its important NOT to completely blanket your character in light, its better if you use lighting to help you better describe form and shape. I find it very helpful to take 1 still of your render desaturate it in Photoshop and check to see if there’s enough contrast that way.
