From the course: Sculpting a Creature with ZBrush and Photoshop

Creating the basic surface skin texture

From the course: Sculpting a Creature with ZBrush and Photoshop

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Creating the basic surface skin texture

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- Without skin our creature would fall to pieces, so in this video, I'll show you how to create some basic surface texture for our character. Okay, so we have everything subdivided to a degree that I think will work for a majority of our base texture. But I want to focus this video on taking a look at the skin. So we've got some basic skin material in there and what we want to do now is add some nice surface texture. So go all the way down to the word Surface that you will find and I already have it open because I'm cheating and I want you to select the Noise button and as you can see, it opens up this really nice dialog window. We've got some texture on our character. Cool thing about this is that you can adjust this little curve editor in there and tell it what type of texture and how the spacing is in between, you can really start making it unique. We'll want this guy to have a little bit more of a realistic skin texture, so we'll keep the adjustment right about in there. You can also play around with the scale, so it can be something big to something small and it can also be really strong or really soft. So let's do something right about in there just a little bit of a variance in the skin. And what's cool about the skin surface texture is it actually works as an overlay, so it's not overly intense and you can't actually smooth it away. So if I hold down the smooth button, it smooths the geometry underneath but it doesn't actually do anything to the skin surface texture. So let's dial up our Damon standard brush and we want to make it pretty big still because we're just throwing in the basic curves and basic ins and outs from one piece of geometry to the other. So if we have our cheek bones as they flow into the jaw bone, it'll be a little bit of an inset there, maybe a furrowed brow will be a little bit more inset we'll play around with some of this on top and as you notice we still have that wonderful skin texture underneath. It's not being affected by us going in and messing around. And I find that adding the skin texture really allows you to see the forms and how they're going to finish. Sometimes if you just start throwing in these Damon standard base wrinkles, they don't really tell you the whole story, so having the skin texture really takes it to that next level. And what you want to do is continue to follow your anatomy reference and understand where these pinch points might take place and just start throwing in the those basic wrinkles, those basic folds and then we will move forward and get into the really fun stuff. So our character is already starting to take shape. Let's keep pushing these details and see how monstrous this creature can really be.

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