I’m working on a lizard like creature, and I would like to know what is the best way to make a scales texture?
For snake like scales you could probably get away to a limited extent using a voronoi procedural texture, but if you need them to overlap then an image texture is your best bet.
the voronoi does look like snake skin, but it barely comes off looking like scales in the final render. I’ll probably end up using, like you said, an image texture.
I haven’t tried it using it as such yet, but in the Gimp there is a filter called “Mosaic” which, if tweaked with, seems to be able to provide a scales effect. The attached image was created simply by applying that filter to a random cloud noise. (Plasma)
Attachments
Thanks for the Help:) , i don’t use gimp unfortuneatly, but ithink i might be able to replicate it in photoshop.
Edit: Ok, I just made this texture in photoshop, it is somewhat similar to yours but it looks a little more like lizard type skin 
Selecte the wood texture then in it’s settings set it to band noise with the either sin or saw (can’t remember what it’s called), then the type of noise you want is voroni f1 and set the noise to hard noise. I may be able to show you later tonight.