Saturday, January 29, 2011

Touching up a skinmap ... adding in tattoos


As promised -- a look at something a little bit special I just did for Fabian Black -- a new story which was asking for something very different. The idea for this one just came to me out of the blue, and it's all about the way the shadows fall and how the blood-red rose blends into the background. Thanks so much to Fabian Black for the opportunity to do this! (Check out Fabian Black Romance right here.)

And -- yep, I got the opportunity to put the Delta Dragons tattoo onto Mick Vidal's cheek:



Didn't get the chance to do the Daku tattoo for his chest -- work was full-on today, and it was hot. I'm about halfway caught up right now, though, and should be able to get that tattoo designed for his chest -- the open-headed ankh of a politico-spiritual sect in the Deep Sky, six centuries from now. Hellgate. I love this stuff. This character got Mel Keegan's stamp of approval yesterday, and with the addition of the Daku symbol, he's done. Nice!

The tattoo was added to the skimmap, not painted onto the images in post. Basically -- find the skinmap images, open them in GIMP or something similar. Zapp on the tattoos or whatever you need to paint on, resave the image under a new file name, somewhere you can easily find it. Then, apply it to Michael 4 in the Surfaces tab -- this one is the SkinFace image. So long as you don't mess about with the contrast, gamma, brightness or color controls, and only paint on the tattoos, the new skinmap image will apply seamlessly, and it's part of the M4 model so it moves around with the character ... nothing to do in post.

Jade, 29 January