November ProgBlog #2

I progressed!

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Zara has been turned into a paint object and I really should have done her nails first but I got excited and launched straight into tattoos.  They ended up looking slightly different from my reference pic (where everything was pretty much guesswork anyway). 

The wraparound dragon turned out to be a bit more confusing than I anticipated.  I already had mad respect for tattoo artists but it just went up several thousand notches.  They don't have undo x_x I also had to make another reference.

It was both too short and facing the wrong way, but helped enough as I mostly needed it to try to work out the leg spacing anyway.

I'm now trying to do scales with this brush that looks like it should do the job, though I need  to work upwards so it's really hard to see anything when the scales are this minute.  There's some hair texture brushes that I'll need to also work out (because painting textures in 3d is slightly different to 2d XD) for the feathers on the phoenix and the froof magnificent and mighty mane on the dragon.

Meanwhile she's still grey as I'm trying out only using maps for stuff like scars, tattoos and whatever other details (displacement etc) and using my skin shader for the skin colour.  I'm hoping it will look better so I can do likewise with Za'haran, and that way the texture setup will be a little bit more modular.  Hopefully the effort saved there will be worth the render time (the procedurals take slightly longer to calculate than uv mapping) but even though I'll think that when setting up characters I probably won't when I have to render XD