Creating Organic Materials - Blender Cycles Materials and Textures - page 328

Creating a gray alien skin material with
procedurals
In this recipe, we will create a gray alien-like skin shader as shown in the following screenshot,
using Cycles procedural textures:
The alien Suzanne as it appears in the final rendering
Getting ready
Start Blender and open the 9931OS_08_alienskin_start.blend file, where there is
an already set scene with an unwrapped Suzanne primitive object.
The Suzanne_unwrapped_alien mesh has been modified by a shape key, to morph its
monkey features into the head of a gray alien-like creature; in fact, in the Object data
window, under the Shape Keys subpanel, there are the alien shape keys, with Value of
1.000 ; sliding the slider towards 0.000 gradually restores the original Suzanne shape.
The Suzanne mesh also has a Vertex Colors layer named Col and is obtained by the
Dirty Vertex Colors tool.
On the second layer, there are two Planes tracked (by a Damped Track constraint, in the
Object Constraints window) to the Camera to stay perpendicular to its point of view; the
star_backdrop object is used to create a simple star backdrop for our alien Suzanne, and
the star_backdrop.001 object is used simply to create something to be reflected by the
alien-like Suzanne's eyes.
Press Shift + F1 (or go through the File | Append main menu) to append the SSS_group
node from the 9931OS_07_SSS_ngroup.blend file.