I sent an e-mail to a friend explaining how I do my work so here’s what I sent. This isn’t always my workflow with projects but for Rikku it was.
Here is the image by the way…
http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s244/Urthrese/myworkflow.jpg
Ok I couldn’t find the original gray scale for the head but I have the body so it’s all good. The first image going left to right is of my first base that gets made up in body paint. In 3dsmax its contrast goes away so in body paint you’ll want to make a nice contrast light to dark. Anyways that first image has basic values that are all around the same area of color; don’t worry about how light the skin will be in comparison to the leather just yet. Just paint in shadows where you would think they would be, under the arms, inside the legs, etc… After you set up that start to paint in the medium details like outlining the clothes and such. Detailed highlights and folds in clothes come last so don’t get to caught up doing the details until your base lighting and shapes look good.
The second image is a lot easier to explain. Set colors in Photoshop where they should be as a color overlay. when you do that you’ll notice that some area’s like skin are too dark, so when that happens adjust your grayscale using the levels in order to get it to be the right brightness it needs. After you do that you will see the grayscale look more like the second image. With that one you can now see it pop out more which is a good thing.
The third image is what your model would look like if you just used the color overlays on top of your grayscale. It looks good but it’s missing something from it. Doing textures this way is really easy but real artists don’t stop at this third step because it’s not true painting. True artists don’t just use values of grayscale to create shadows, they use color. That is what is missing from this step. So at this point you want to make sure you have everything where you like it and make a collapsed layer of everything (make a new layer in Photoshop and then hit ctrl+shift+e) and then start painting in color where it needs to be and adjust the saturation of your texture.
At the end it should look more like the fourth image. This one you can see it pop out a lot more and you see how it comes to life with the addition of subtle colors and changing the saturation. I wish I could just explain how colors work and what to use where but that is something you’ll just have to figure out through painting because every texture will be different. For this one I actually used a little bit of red in her shadows on the skin as an example. Remember that even if you use normal maps that are really detailed you need to know these color tricks in order to make your model pop out the way it should.
I don’t have any tricks for painting in body paint or Photoshop, I don’t use color dodge or anything else like that. I make one layer and just paint it like it was my own canvas. None of my textures go by quickly either, I am a very slow worker but in the end I’m proud of what I did.
That’s about all I did for this one. I hope this helps explain things.
