hi everyone.
i’m sort of new to textureing and am stugling. i’m trying to make a realistic scale texture for a dragon i’m makeing but i can’t seem to get it right. i tried a soft shadeing texture and that looked extreemly pixated even with a large image. so i tryed just picking a colour and drawing scales on but that didn’t work eather. both looked fake. how do i make it seem realistic?
if you’re careful you can make or use a nor map I can mess around and see what i can get if you’d be so kind as to post your blend file. I can show you step by step what I did for future applications.
no guarantee Ill make it look nice but you never know 
im no expert at all but i always seem to get my stuff looking how i want it to
awesome I will check it out and see what I can do. 
check in or send me a pm shouldn’t be long before i know if I can get it looking ok haha.
Are you UV unwrapping? It doesn’t look like you are in that file. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it is absolutely necessary to uv unwrap and edit your diffuse texture externally to get a realistic texture.
i’m working on that right now First i’m testing with some scaly looking nor textures then working with an unwrap to get it right.
i usualy do UV uwrrap but i have a bit of diificulty telling wich part of the dragon is wich. if i can tell what part is what how do i import the map into photoshop? so i can make the texture, i’ve just been takeing screenshots but i’m sure there’d be a better way.
p.s. sorry about the noob question but i don’t usualy use textures, just differant coloured matirials. sorry about my bad spelling too.:o
sorry again but what is a nor map?
a nor map is a way to give your model the appearance of being raised or sunken depending on the black and white spectrum in an image btw I am lost in this sea of faces haha is there any way you can unwrap the model yourself and re upload the .blend or just send me the image. by selecting UVs in the UV window and scripts/save UV face layout. I have other projects going on but i would really like to help you to get this dragon looking awesome! I just dont have the time to go all out and do so much work
yea the faces realy confused me too. i’ll give it a try. thanks for all the help:)
I’d personally use a tiling scales texture for all areas that have smaller scales (so you don’t need a massive resolution for it to look sharp, along with a normal map for the bump effect).
Having modeled Dragons before, I generally use one tiling image for all the small scales and one (can be a tiled image) for the scales generally found around the mouth (or you can have one for the entire head depending on what you wanted to do). I would also usually model the belly and neck scales instead of using an image, if you have large scales on the head and you wanted a certain pattern you could sometimes attempt to model part of that as well.
For one of my models I generally used three different materials for each area and blending them together using vertex color layers (accessible with vertex paint mode), and material node trees (using the geometry node to mix the materials together using the vertex color layers).
You can download a free procedural-based texture making app. called MapZone and it has a reptile scales example ready to alter and save as an image file.
As for UVmapping I’d enable the Live-LSCM menu option in the UVeditor, that way you can use the pin item to pin the faces that already have been done and jiggle the new area to unwrap it based on where it is in relation to the pinned verticies, it makes UVmapping a breeze because you can just do incremental unwrapping without tons of guesswork.