Wow, it looks great!
I don’t know how are you handing vertex groups, but consider that in Tissue, there is also Color-Weight Exchanger that contains two tools for convert vertex colours to vertex group (and vice versa). You can use Dirty Vertex Paint (Vertex Paint Mode), and then convert it to vertex group. The result is a vertex group similar to a curvature map of the surface. Maybe you can mix it with other vertex groups for get a weight map that follow the dragon’s head geometry.
Thanks
That was pretty much my workflow. I did see those buttons and hoped they did what they do. So my whole test was just to see weather those tools do what I had perceived they were for. I did use Dirty Vertex for initial conversion to Vertex Group. But because this mesh does not lend too well for great Dirty Vertex variation, I went in and hand painted the weights a bit.
After running Decimate, my mesh did not have satisfying variation yet, so I additionally went into dyntopo and dynamicaly affected the mesh density using Collapse and Subdivide alternately (on a brush with zero strength so it does not affect the shape, just topology).
I was just eager to run Dual Mesh and complete the full circle of the workflow and see what I’d get, cause I had no idea weather the approach would work and what it’d look like.
After Dual Mesh, Inset + Extrude.
I was looking at the result and wondered how it’d look if I placed that over the original sculpt. When I did, I realized I can sculpt on the Dual Mesh to hide certain parts.
Anyway, it’s a first full circle of the workflow. Hopefully on the next go I can start playing with the concept creatively having all this insight.
I’m really impressed with the whole workflow you’ve conjured up, and then made a comprehensive tool for that! Thanks again for this gem.
BTW, that Gecko skin link from post #57 does not work, would love to see that.
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erickBlender . With the explanation in post #62 + this post you should be able to replicate the workflow.
This looks all really impressive, but as Allessandro can’t program in C and Campbell prefer quilting, maybe we could get a quilting modifier Please please please please
Looking at what people have done with this, it’s a no brainer that it should be a modifier written in C, it will especially become useful in that case since you would have the benefit of controlling where it is applied via vertex groups.
The Dragon test also looks pretty good (though the smaller scales seem to be invading the chest a bit and don’t cover near as much in other areas). Having automated scale generating with that method would mean not having to sculpt them in (which would shave off a ton of polygons).
That is a great way to do it @0rAnge!! Thank’s for sharing your test.
I just installed it and it works great, thank you very much @alessandrozompa
EDIT:
Here’s some images, I don’t really understand the dual mesh concept (the spheres on the second image were made with it), but it is certainly fun to play with!
Basically the Addon that Alessandro made is a pack of what could be considered 2 Addons/workflows.
One is what he calls ‘Tissue’ and is used to create things like posts #42, #52 etc.
The other he refers to as ‘Dual Mesh’, this one is used to create things like #14, #15, and my dragon test.
He’s got some info on the whole shabang on his blog.
Here’s a render of it in Cycles. Unfortunately I can not boolean them as the meshes are not clean/suited for booleans. As an effect of that, I have 2 mshes on top of each other and they cancel out my SSS, so the shader sucks.
OrAngE, that’s awesome!
I didn’t understand why are you using two meshes overlaped. Is it not possible to achieve the same effect with only dual-mesh?[QUOTE][/QUOTE]
Here’s a comparison on how the Dual Mesh looks on it’s own, and how it looks with the original sculpt visible as well.
Dual Mesh:
Dual Mesh + original sculpt (both visible):
You can see the difference. The DualMesh is a lot more uniform i terms of crispness, and coverage.
So once I overlapped both meshes, I realized I can quickly sculpt on the DualMesh and push (hide) it under the original sculpt. It’s a super quick way to explore the concept further.
In red are some spots marked on the DualMesh that are pushed under the original sculpt. This method allows also to get variation in the crispness of the DualMesh by slightly offseting it in either direction. Some of these areas were marked in blue:
I was hoping to then boolean the 2 meshes and get a single clean piece. But my original sculpt mesh had intersecting surfaces, and the boolean modifier will not take these. So I have to figure out a quick way of dealing with this situation. I’ll post a render here once I get that, this is how the shader is supposed to look.
Overall I feel like the method and addon you’ve come up with is way more effective than trying to come up with the same concept by creating a texture. And definitely beats manual sculpting. I’m super impressed with what you’ve come up with! I’m sure I’ll be abusing this workflow for future creature works.
@OrAngE now it is clear however why did you used sculpting for pushing on the bottom the dual-mesh instead of smoothing it?
Anyway, you dragons are impressive! Nice to have helped you with the skin
@biblio11 interesting plug-in, thanks for sharing it!
Please please please please 
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