Making of Paragalis – part 2

“Making of Paragalis – part 2 ” by Marcus Dublin
Continuing work on the base skin, I move into phase four which has me combining all of the material elements giving it a cohesive feel. I tend to spend a good deal of time at this stage making sure things feel natural asking myself, “does this look right, does it feel out of place”. What I like to do at this stage is to reference actual animals, I like to see where dirt accumulates, bruises, color shifts, scars, bumps, you name it, my main priority is making sure the whole skin looks “believable” and natural.
On a last note about the skin: I try to remove as much noise and intrusive light as possible, leaving those elements in place can tend to make the texture overly grainy and disjointed. I tend to remove the lighting and noise in the original material itself by first lowering the contrast and also by setting my brush mode to normal and painting them out.

Continuing work on the base skin, I decided to add some color in the mouth area. I used some references that I had of human gums, and fish gills “pretty weird huh”. Along with adding those details I kept refining the color by adding elements that worked with the creature’s physical body and nature. For instance I made sure to add some exposed skin color around the mouth, back of the head, around the fingers, bottom of the tail, and the base of the spikes across its back.

Now that I’m happy with the base skin it’s time for me to work on the tongue. The tongue in particular needs to be interesting enough to stand out when launched but it shouldn’t take away from the body as a whole! I used two main material elements reflecting the desired surface type for the tongue base. Both elements were taken from photos of skinless salmon; I thought it would work as a nice base due to the surface texture. Since I don’t want the tongue to be as red as the source material, I shifted the color by using “Image/Adjust/Variations”. I also want to point out that I varied the scale from the back of the tongue to the front; this gives it a sense of overall scale and dimension.

Now that my tongue has a base material on it, it’s time for me to see how it integrates with the body. As you can see from the image below its way too hot and monochromatic! With that said it’s time to move on the next step, which involves painting and color blending.

Painting and color blending using this technique in particular is a tricky affair and it requires a subtle touch. A number of years ago before normal maps and advanced game engines artists were essentially painting in all of the values into their textures. Everything from shading, mid tones, highlights, etc. were built right into the diffuse map, with specular and bump maps playing a supportive role. Well in this day and age it’s important to have a better sense of balance as texture artists have to think ahead in terms of how AO/light maps, normal maps, specular maps, alpha maps, SSS, post processing etc. all work with each other. In short the responsibilities for a texture artist have been expanded to some degree.As you can see from the image below I started to add my color blends along with the shading and highlights. I do this by adding a few layers within the assigned group and set those layers to “normal, color, and overlay”, I generally go over the whole body adding color shifts where appropriate. Areas like the top head, tentacles, legs, back hump, etc. all receive this treatment. The tongue in particular has been given a number of strong highlights to really sell the clammy nature of it. I also blended a bit of color to offset the hot pink that was evident throughout. I decide to use some sky blue for the highlights, blue violet and orange for the mid tones, green for the shadows and a touch of purple for the veins.

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