Question Any "Full" Skin Texture Guides/HowTo Out There?

[venkman]

So, I'm trying to create a custom player skin that makes liberal use of the Normal maps to create "channels/lines" in a player's skin.

Thought I was making some stellar progress...until I got to the bit where I wanted to make these lines wrap from the face around the back of the head.

I was able to get the positions on the seams more or less lined up, but I'm now running into a few issues with the Normal map:

1. The lighting "direction" doesn't match at the seams. One half appears to be lit from above, the other from below.

2. Due to the fact that the face texture is stored as one 4096x4096 file, and the "back of head" texture seems to be stored in a much smaller region in the torso file of the same dimensions, the lines were much bigger on the back of head region after the program scales them up to the appropriate size. I was able to mostly fix this by upscaling the torso texture 4x.

Currently, I'm doing all of this in Photoshop, but I feel like the "right" way would probably be to work directly in Daz or something?

As such, can anybody recommend any tips, guides, pointers to how I can more efficiently draw "whole-head/body" lines in skin textures and just have everything line up?

 

[Molmark]

My advice - use Substance Painter. Then you can draw directly on the model

 

[venkman]

My advice - use Substance Painter. Then you can draw directly on the model

I'll check it out, thanks.

 

[HotHead]

I use ZBrush, make the relief I need on the whole model at once, export it to normal maps and bake everything else in the subattance painter. Then it remains only to paint. Maps from ZBrush solve the problem of mismatch in the resolution of the textures of the face and the rest of the body.