Hello there!
I'm new around here, here is my first post of a cat lizard creature.
It is of course sculpted in ZBrush (not a first time use) , and the new software I tried on to learn/practice was Mari (for the texturing) and Arnold for the render. Its ''inspired'' by big cats and lizards, specifically the argus monitor lizard (mainly the coloration), cat for overall body structure/muscles , legs from ostrich/emus, and the head is sort of a lion skull/ Dunkleosteus / leatherback turtle / crab features combined. Oh and big fat jaw muscles like on an iguana or a tegu lizard.
Awesome. Id love to know a bit about how you worked in mari. I have yet to get hands on with it and texture a creature. Probably similar to yourself. I know its there, i just havent done it yet. Great work!
Ok, I'll write down some points that seem relevant to me, but since I don't know where you're at with Mari (I'm quite new too, this is the first thing I made with it) you'll have to ask me more, if you want. So I imported my low poly model in it (couldn't get it to work smooth enough with the high poly sculpt, I got like 0.5 frames per second in the view port . My PC is too old/not build for this I guess, and/or I didn't understand enough to optimize it more). Imported a displacement map, a normal map, AO map, and some cavity type maps made with the masking tools in ZBrush and filling with polypaint. I used them in Mari mostly trough the projection masking tool. And plugged the normal maps in a shader so I can kind of see what I'm doing looks like , if it were on the high poly model or a displaced model. I made 4-6 procedural layers with a tiling texture and adjusted every layer's color to match the color palette I've made from sampling my animal reference. I masked them all and revealed every layer trough the projection masking tool, wherever I wanted certain color (well wherever it seemed to be on the reference images ). The leopard like-pattern is directly ripped off from an Argus monitor lizard. Searched the web for the highest res pictures of it I could find (mostly from flickr the website). And in Photoshop I extracted its pattern, into a B&W images. I projection painted them in Mari. The more repetitious part of the pattern I made with a procedural noise layer. For skin/scale flaking I also used some tiled textures like marble, and with masking I revealed it where I wanted. Some flaking was projection painted on specific places. A lot of these things were on separate layers. I used the cavity maps,Ao maps some of the colors layers, and the flaking layers to make the specular and roughness maps. They were also plugged in Mari's approximation of an Arnold standard shader so I can see how they look like. Oh and I exported the flaking layers as a black and white image to use as a bump map. I guess the flaking (which was 8bit black and white texture) could somehow be combined with the displacement map (which was 32 bit floating-point , with only a red channel) in Mari , so i have less textures to manage/ work with, but I din't try it/ look into it enough.
Nice one for the breakdown! That is exactly the kind of thing i was looking for. Ive used Mari to do some matte painting projections recently. Did a little bit of creature texture work when I was less familiar with it and never got too deep into Mari's capabilities.
Gonna create a more demanding creature and use Mari to a greater extent in the texturing next. This is more than enough to get started with. If I need to ask you more would you mind if I asked you here on this thread again?