Been a while since I’ve posted a tutorial. Scott Spencer demonstrates how to paint a texture directly on a 3D mesh in ZBrush.

He starts off with some very saturated basic colors, red, yellow, and blue. The red is used for the nose, cheeks, lips, eyelids, ears, and other parts of the skin where light would absorb into the epidermal surface and scatter. The yellow is used for areas that might reflect more light like the forehead and clavicles. The blue is for areas where shadows would collect in places like the inner eye socket, the neck, and parts of the neck. He then goes over the entire mesh with a small white brush with low opacity to sort of vein it all up. Then he blends it all together using a flesh tone again at a low opacity to blend the colors into the skin to give it color variation, depth, and the illusion of light bouncing off muscle tissue and veins.

As I was watching this truly inspiring time lapse video, I thought it might be fun to try this same technique on a 2D digital painting. I’ll have to give this a try sometime. Even if you’re not a 3D artist, this is a great video tutorial.

[Via Scott Spencer]

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 12:51 am and is filed under Tutorials, Animation, Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.