3D Iterations Part 7

Since I planned my gargoyle to be old and worn, I thought it would be a good idea to try and put some lichen textures on it.

My first attempt did not look very great since I didn't consider how the lichen would form. Plus, I feel I did not achieve the right effect for lichen, since it is usually quite pronounced against the stone, unlike here where it blends in too much. I also needed to tweak the material, colour and lighting as here it does not look like any kind of stone at all.

Here is the second attempt with the textures, whilst also changing up the lighting and reducing the specular on the material. I did a much better job this time around, but I had to create new alphas both for the lichen and the cracks as I could not achieve the desired effect with what ZBrush had by default. I am please with how this came out, so I may keep this as my final sculpt.

This is the alpha I used for the lichen. I wanted quite a rough texture so I did not blur as much as I did with other alphas. Plus, I kept the inside of the lichen less bright so as to utilise the gradient option when polypainting (darker areas will use more secondary colour, lighter areas more primary colour). This produced a nice variation in colour and tone, which I believe created a fairly realistic lichen texture on my sculpt.

I also created my own alpha for the cracks, which I dragged out with DragRect and my brush set to ZSub. I didn't want too many cracks so I kept the image rather sparse, which I believe created an overall better outcome in the end.