Blender WIP - Animated Skull (.blend included)

[marscaleb]

How did you get all the texture detail? Did you make your own bump maps? From what and how?

[thekingofthevikings]

@marscaleb @marscaleb I sculpted a normal map in Blender. A lot of the finer details were done by hand, the rest were images used as textures for my sculpting brush. I layered three different ones, but relied heavily on one of the nature->vine images from cgtextures to make the majority of the deep cracks.

I then baked the normals (tangent) to a lower poly mesh and used that normal map as a reference in gimp to make the diffuse and specular maps.

[marscaleb]

@thekingofthevikings

Frik, dude, this is the kind of stuff I need to do for a lot of my models in Maya. I've just got nothing for adding in proper detail for the normal map...

[thekingofthevikings]

@marscaleb Maya doesn't have sculpting? Is that why everyone uses Zbrush?

[marscaleb]

@thekingofthevikings

If it does, I don't know where to find it...

[thekingofthevikings]

@marscaleb That's too bad, you can make normal maps in Photoshop if you are handy with it. Game-artist (.net) has a great tutorial about it. Go to their forums, then spotlight articles and check out the "Tutorial: Hard Surface Texture Painting" thread.

[thekingofthevikings]

@thekingofthevikings Sorry, I meant "BUMP maps in Photoshop", not "NORMAL maps in Photoshop".