Four: Retooling the Juvenile Skin

Basic displacement map

  Having some difficulty with the normal maps and the Mila shader I investigated another angle. Exporting a displacement map from Mudbox appears to have given Four definition where there was none before, and while it has added a fair degree to render times, an added benefit could be that when these regions fold, the sharper geometry in the compressed spaces will create a (somewhat) more realistic set of folds when it comes to lighting.

an occlusion map was added to bring out the darker regions

The result of a normal map added alongside the displacement map

  One plan was to use a normal map alongside the displacement, as the image above shows however, this caused a couple of errors that annihilated some of the definition; the opposite of what I was after. The experiment concluded, the normal map was removed and definition was kept to the displacement map.

The specular was toned down and a highlight added to give translucency to the skin

 Now that the displacement map is providing something that needed to be supplemented by features on the texture map, I figured the textures need redesigning.

  To od this, the displacement and ambient occlusion maps will be used as a template to work out where the folds are, crevices will be darkened to give colour. The image below is the model with this template, which looks somewhat horrifying as the poor creature is covered in yellow-green marks. After I'm done with the texture, something much cleaner should take this image's place.