Velociraptor Model/Render

[pcmorrison]

Hi all,

I’ve been playing around with blender for a while, mostly to create things for 3D printing. I love designing and modeling creatures and I want to learn how to create more convincing skins and details for them so I set a challenge for myself to create a realistic velociraptor. I’m fairly happy with the base model, but I’ve been having difficulty getting the skin right, and also figuring out how to add different colors (I want dark red stripes along the sides and down the spine.

First I tried using an image of real reptile skin. From a distance it looks good, but I wasn’t happy with the seams that appeared up close. This one I gave some dramatic lighting and a fake background so I could put it up on my blog:

Next I created my own skin in GIMP. I wasn’t too happy with this one either, but at least I was able to make it seamless.

I really want to make the skin look more realistic, and add some patterns like red stripes to the back and sides. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to do that in blender? I’m working in cycles now for rendering and I’m having some trouble layering textures.

Thanks!

[Bill_Nguyen]

you’re gonna need a lot more then just 1 texture to make it look good. use blender texture paint mode to give it more details. or, unwrap it and use an external image editor, like Photoshop or Gimp.

[pcmorrison]

I’m using a normal map, occlusion, spec, and displacement to create the texture/3D effects. I’m having some trouble getting the colors to come through properly.

This is the node layout I’m using.

I have the texture color coming in all the way to the left, but I have another color going into the final mix shader. What I’m finding is that the only color that comes through is the final color, even if I remove that node and the mix node. Do you know how I can make the initial texture color take precedence?

Thanks!

[Bill_Nguyen]

CrazyBump right?

for the color, just use an RGB curves node on the color map and tweak it to get the color you want. the Specular map is suppose to be the value of the mix node combining the diffuse and glossy, not of the 2 diffuse

what i mean by using more than 1 texture for details, i don’t mean using all the spec and normals and occlusion maps, which is needed, but still wouldn’t help if the color map itself is nothing but a seamless texture you downloaded from the internet. use that file as the texture for the brush in blender’s texture paint mode and start giving it some variations. some small scales here, bigger scales there, all that kind of stuffs. and then using elephant wrinkles texture maybe so give it some more details. then maybe add some scutes, more tyoe of scales, osteoderms, etc. take a look at my t rex, and see how the texture consist of many different things http://wildman1411.deviantart.com/art/Feathers-FTW-563567755

[JMoon]

Hey there,
Very cool model. I think there are two problems. First your OCC map is set to “mix” with your COLOR map before it goes into your first diffuse shader. Click the drop-down where it says “mix” and change it to “add” or “multiply”. With “mix” you are taking the black and white image and just mixing it 40% with your color, so it’s desaturating everything instead of giving the AO effect.
I also think you should look at the way you have set up your specular map. You are mixing in a white Diffuse shader, using the Spec map as the Fac for your final node. You don’t want your Spec map to control a diffuse shader, this again is desaturating your colors. I think you want to remove this last node entirely. Your Spec map can be the Fac for the Mix Shader that has your Diffuse and Glossy as inputs. Then output that as your final Material Output. Try that and see how it looks.

[Benjee10]

Yeah, you need to UV unwrap it and then paint the textures in texture paint mode. Using tiled textures on creatures never really works. Model looks nice though and the eye looks good!

[pcmorrison]

Thanks for the advice! This was my first post so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was working today, then had class tonight so I wasn’t able to work on this model, but I am eager to try out these different techniques. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Bill: Yes, crazy bump. Do you like that one? I think it’s way easier than making all the textures myself in GIMP or creating normal maps!

[Bill_Nguyen]

yeah Crazy bump is ok, i use it a lot too.

for the textures, i usually to make a color map, and a texture map separately, with the texture map being just a grey scale image. then i combine the 2 using a mix node set to overlay, or i just combine them in photoshop. finally generate all the additional maps with crazy bump using the texture map. this is because if you use an image with colors on crazy bump, the program tend to calculate the depths of the image onto the 3d object base on the color as well, and sometimes, it gives unexpected result

[pcmorrison]

Thanks Bill. I tried following your advice to get this model to look right and I realized I don’t even know what I don’t know. The base mesh was way too dense to apply textures to!

I realized I needed to learn the process from start to finish so I started some courses a couple of days ago on creating 3D models for animation and video games. Definitely different from what I was doing for 3D printing!

I really want to become proficient in this medium and pursue a career creating assets for games and animations. It looks like you are currently doing just that, and I really like the style and subjects of your models. Do you have any advice for someone looking to do the same? Maybe something along the lines of how you got your first gig, or what kind of resume you use?

[Bill_Nguyen]

well, i gotta say, i’m no expert. there are a crap load of things that i still need to learn. we do seems to have a similar idea for the future, so here’s a few things to get started. get ready to do some reading…

the first step is to learn how to model, you probably already got the basic, but practice makes perfect. a mesh with a nice topology is crucial for anything else to look good. through out 4 years of using blender i have made almost 100 animals models, and still there are flaws in my meshes. so keep cranking out more and more models.

then comes sculpting. now, most people use it extensively, but for my dinosaurs, i don’t actually use it that much. only for a few extra details to be used as a normal map. the main reason being that my laptop is not a very powerful one, so i cannot affort to crank up the sculpt level as high as i want it to be to achieve the level of details i desire. work around, texturing. (you can of course, sculpt as much as you like/can)

one thing you should know about me, i used to be a game modder, for a small kid’s game about managing a zoo, adopting animals and what not, and that’s where i got started ( you can check my blog post to read all about that). and in gaming, or at least, old ones, texture is very important as every thing is rely on it to look good. bad texturing result in bad graphics. here’s how i go about texturing my dinosaurs.

-first i make a color map for the diffuse, using basic color brush to paint, maybe combine it with some procedual textures like voronoi to get an interesting pattern (recently i got the idea to seperate the pattern as a “pattern map” so i can some how tweak it using the nodes setup and i can easily get variations, but i haven’t try it out yet)
-then comes the texture map, this will be all the details like scales, wrinkles, osteoderms, all those stuffs that i wish i could have done with scultping, but i’m putting it all on the texture map. make a new image, set color to be medium grey. use a paint brush with white color, set to overlay, load in a texture for the brush (seamless would be better) and start painting away.
-depends on the usage, you can have as much map as you want, so long as you know exactly what’s you’re gonna do with it. for a recent project of my, i made a crevices map to amplify the gap between an ankylosaurus and it’s huge osteoderms, rock like features on it’s back. i use that as a displacement texture for the displacement in the material

back in the modding days, i made all these maps with photoshop, but combining them all into a final texture file which the game will use. and i still have a habbit of doing that now. i usually go to photoshop once i have painted all the maps in blender, put each map on a separate layer, change the blend type of the texture map (as well as any other maps there might be) to overlay and now i have myself a “combined map”. i find using this map as a diffuse looks better than just the color map. use crazybump to generate the 4 additional maps as per usual, and we can call it done with texturing.

than comes material, if you heard of Crazybump, i’m guessing you might have watched BlenderGuru’s tutorial on realistic texturing, so you probably knows how to set the maps up. but remember to add in Subsurface scattering too. when it comes to skin materials, that’s a must have.

then it’s the rigging. that’s still a big myth for me actually. i know how to set up a basic rig, weight paint, IK and all. but how’s IK really work i haven’t yet to fully understand. too many constraints and i got lost in my own project. so that’s still something i need to look up.

and that’s pretty much all i have to say, kinda anti-climatic and way too long. i apologies if i bored you.

[pcmorrison]

Wow, thank you for the detailed response! I’m going to try doing a retopo of the raptor model, and then try the techniques you mention here. Once I’m done I’ll put it up here again. Thanks again!