Hand-painted textures

So the current "Crohood" creature model had a geometry incomplatible with the animations we wanted to implement. Since I know some modeling fundamentals I decided to redo it myself. When I was done, however, the textures and texture mapping were no longer compatible.

I felt curious about creating textures, so I decided to create the ones for one of our creatures myself too.

The UV mapping is tedious but at its core is just a matter of marking seams and then unwrapping until you have uniform and proportional areas. I also had to do some extra work because I wanted to stack them so the same texture could be applied to all feathers in each group (this was worth it since I had to do less painting later).

This is the final texture packing with the main texture:


Then painting. From an art-technique point of view, making this kind of hand-painted textures does not require a lot of art knowledge. Of course if you know color theory and those things your textures will look better, but you can make decent ones just by applying shadows and highlights in the proper places.

My process:

• 1- Set base colors by just using paint bucket tool.
• 2- With low opacity, add some variation in color in general areas (for example, the feathers are painted cleared towards the tip). I recomend using colors with slighly different hue instead of just different value, to differentiate this from shadows and highlights.
• 3- Add said shadoes and highligths. I just used VERY low opacity black and white, layer over layer until it looked good. You usually want to add hightligts along geometry edges so they look washed out.

Some more tips:

• It helps to set a number colors in the palette to keep a consistent look.
• Use low opacity to avoid hard borders.
• Use the finger tool to blend colors, to my surprise it creates the illusion of smooth surfaces better than plain color does.

The hardest part was the body, since I didn't know what to draw there, neither did I want it to look smooth. I finally settled  for a lighter area in the chest, dim highlight in the top part of the wings and a small feather here and there. Final result: