Rotten Skin

I was kinda wondering how to create rotten skin.
Are there texture maps for this kind of thing are you going to have to texture paint them

Many ways to skin this cat (and start the decaying process :wink:) you could do it procedurally, with image textures, you could hand paint it… it’s really up to you. Personally, I would make a normal skin and a rotten skin shader procedurally and mix them either procedurally or with vertex colors, but again, that’s just me.

How much experience with texturing do you have? How much time and effort are you willing to put into his? How good does it need to look- if it’s just going to be seen for a few seconds in a dark shot, you can get away with super simple, for example? What style are you going for- realistic? Stylized? Hand painted? Cel shaded? Is the model going to deform/be animated? Are you using Eevee or Cycles?

The answers to those questions will determine the answer to yours - right now, the answer is “you just do it”. With more details we can help narrow that down :slight_smile:

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I don’t think you’ll find a lot of pre-existing material or already made textures.

We see a lot of healthy faces everyday that’s why it’s really difficult to make a face look right.
A rotten face is something hopefully we don’t precisely know how it looks like therefore you have to concentrate more on the subjective idea about how we think it could look like. Make it believable more than realistic.

There is also some art direction, like if you’re doing a mummy you’ll look for something that might look quite dry and aged, and if you’re more into zombies you’ll want something maybe more fresh and infected.

First step as always is start to look for references, that will give you a lot of ideas.

From there get creative , if I had to do something a bit zombie like I’ll gather textures from these kind of elements…
A bark texture :
image

Moss texture :

A fungus :

Another one :

Some burned plastic :
image

Probably by manipulating some of these images into photoshop I’ll get very weird textures that might end up pretty convincing. I might also take some of them as reference and do more paint or sculpting work on the model.

I didn’t even bother looking for rotten meat or something close, to show that a lot of unrelated things might work since we are more on the subjective idea rather than reality.

Hope that helps !

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I’m with Sozap on believable.

If you do want accuracy then find medical sites or books with real photos of frostbite, gangrene, leprosy, etc. If I was doing that I would not use any of those photos to make textures from respect or sympathy for the victims. I would use the knowledge gained to make my own textures using other resources such as the references Sozap recommended.

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Not sure if you wanted to do this yourself, but I’m pretty sure there are some in the BlenderKit Online Asset Library (free add-on). I may have written the name in the wrong order. I definitely remember there being a “zombie skin” in the collection. Just search “skin” and you’ll get lots to play with.

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Yes I have a collection that was/is available for free ( just don’t remember where it came from)
Of Monster Alien Skin and Monster Alien Armor… they do look a bit rotten…There is also Bloody Flesh out there…

I think these came from Artstation. Maybe?
But check all the free PBR shaders out there also…I remember several others…

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Thanks a lot, that was quite helpful

Figures this would be the first thread I click right after eating stew.

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