Texture Painting - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 158

lists all sorts of inputs that can be used to drive
the brush's behavior, and the left side of the
matrix lists the brush settings these inputs can
be used to affect. Set Pressure to affect the
brush's opacity and Random to affect the size
and rotation of each brush mark. With these
dynamics in place, you now get a nice random,
grungy-looking brushstroke that you can use for
all sorts of textures (see Figure 11-5, right line).

Figure 11-7: Choosing some initial colors to
paint the Bat Creature's skin makes it easy to
return to the same colors again and to main-
tain a consistent color palette.

Texturing the Bat Creature
I wanted textures to make the Bat Creature look like
a creature of the night: patchy, purplish skin and dis-
colored nails, with some extra wrinkles, freckles, and
veins to add some details on top of those I sculpted.
To create them, I built up my textures in stages, first
blocking in basic colors and then smoothing and
refining them before adding the details.
I started by painting some flat colors in
Blender's Texture Paint mode. I then saved my
work and opened it in GIMP for finer textur-
ing—for example, I combined my painted texture
map with the ambient occlusion map I baked in
Chapter 10. I then used GIMP to manipulate and
supplement the diffuse texture to create specular
and hardness textures.
To begin blocking in my colors, I dropped into
Edit mode and assigned a new blank image to the
mesh for the Bat Creature (the mesh used for bak-
ing textures in Chapter 10, not the high-res sculpted
mesh). The New Texture dialog lets us choose a
color to fill the new image, so I set it to a muted
pinkish purple—a sort of unhealthy skin color that
might befit a denizen of the night.
Next, I established an overall palette of colors
for my texture in the UV Image editor, selecting an
unused space not mapped to any part of the mesh
(see Figure 11-7). I chose a darker purple for use
in shadowed areas, like the area under the eyes; a
lighter yellowish color for bony areas; a dark, satu-
rated red for veins and areas with a lot of blood flow;
and a darker and lighter version of the original base
color to act as shadows and highlights. (We're not
painting lighting into our texture; I'm talking only
about lighter and darker skin coloration in different
areas.) I also chose a light contrasting color to act as
a highlight in some areas. I painted a little of each
onto my image so that I could color pick from them
for use later, either in the UV Image editor or when
painting in the 3D Viewport.

Materials and UI Setup for Painting
When in Texture Paint mode, Blender will
by default show the texture you are painting
on applied to your mesh in the 3D view, with
Blender's default solid shading. As with sculpting,
however, we can use Blender's GLSL Shading mode
to display the texture in different ways by adding
simple lights to the scene (see Chapter 13 for more
on lighting) and a simple material to the mesh (see
Chapter 12 for more on materials).
For the Bat Creature, I added a simple material
to the bat object, which I named Body_TexturePaint .
In the Textures tab of the Properties editor, I added
a new texture to this material, set its type to Image,
selected my painted image that I had already assigned
to the object's UVs, and set the mapping type for the
texture to UV.

Adding a Light

To make the object visible in GLSL Shading mode,
we need to add a light, so in Object mode, I created
a new Hemi lamp to light my object. Switching into
Textured Viewport mode (make sure that shading
is set to GLSL in the Display panel of the Properties
region), I could see that this lit the Bat Creature from
above only, so I duplicated the lamp and rotated it
180 degrees to light the object from below. Next,
I decreased the intensity of the new duplicate to
around 0.3 in the Lamp's Object Data tab in order
to leave a little difference between the lighting from
above and below the character. I also turned off the
specular component for the lamps (see Figure 11-8)
so that my mesh wouldn't look shiny.