Different parts of a body have different types of skin. The way I’d prefer to deal with this is procedurally based via shader and maybe geo nodes because those are lossless and realistic and they don’t have pixelation mis-match and they don’t have UV distortion.
So, let’s say I create slightly rough skin with a combination of noises, and then create smooth skin with a combination of noises.
Well, how can I just arbitrarily draw on my character’s base mesh where I want rough skin vs smooth skin to show up? Maybe by drawing black and white and plugging it into the “frac”, but now I’ve just entered the unsavory realm of UV maps and texture paintings, 2 additional layers of complexity to my process that I don’t want to deal with, and which won’t have high resolution.
Is there an alternative? Some kind of…lossless, no-paint way to just draw shaders onto a character?
The only thing that comes to mind is vertex/face data. How do you call that data in shader nodes if you use different vertex weights?
You can either draw on a UV map or vertex paint, there are no other possible options. Both have pros and cons- vertex painting doesn’t require UV mapping, but you’ll need an impossibly high polygon density to get clean details
Don’t like UV? Set up Smart Unwrap and go from there. Don’t want sharp edges? Soften tool is your friend. Don’t want pixels? Use Vertex Paint but be prepared to use higher resolutions at detailed transitions.
If you want to stay away from images but are still using textures - go the route of using a decal-inspired process of black and white procedural spherical gradients in the shader tree mapped to Empties like decals that you can move about on the object surface with snapping and drive the location of your ‘rough’ textures. You’ll need to use the vector mapping node and use Object>Empty as your Texture Coordinate, and a colorramp as a slider to control intensity.