Others Let's Talk Character Texturing (Example inside)

[NanoGames]

I recently decided to try and create my first character texture, and since I couldn't find any discussion about it here I thought that maybe we could use this thread to share tips and tricks and answer questions on the subject. Hopefully someone that knows what they're doing drops by because getting this done has been challenging to put it mildly.

I'll start by describing what were my goals at the start, what tools I decided to use, and the general workflow that I followed. I won't be a full guide because I think my workflow is trash, but feel free to ask questions if there's something you would like to know more about.

What follows next is the journey I went through to create the texture you'll see near the end of this post, it was all by trial and error and doing what I thought might work, so it's far from professional advice

The Goal
What did I want to achieve? Well, I as many others here use DAZ, so while I was creating a new character I thought it'd be nice to create my own textures. I decided to create a face texture since it's the most important one and creating the whole body would take too much time, for that I will modify one I owned.
I think this is a practical approach, spend time creating a unique face texture for your character as that's what's going to have the biggest impact, and then for the rest reuse assets you like and modify them so they fit together.

The Tools
With the goal clear, next was deciding what software and resources to use. I had created textures before in Substance Designer and I thought that I could create different patches of skin and maybe blend them with an existing texture and eventually I would have a completely new texture. Does that sound like a lot of work? Yeah, thought so too, so I decided to leave that idea for another time. I don't have a lot of experience with Substance Painter and had struggled in the past trying to use it, so in the end, I decided to use the ol'reliable Photoshop.

The Resources
Since I wanted something that looked at least similar in quality to other DAZ characters, I searched for something to use as a base for my texture. There are many options, some I considered but didn't end up using were high res photos and merchant resources from the DAZ store.
The photos would require me to first eliminate the lighting information and then create matching roughness maps, bump maps, etc, which is not impossible but I wasn't sure I'd be able to pull it off.
The merchant resource on the other hand would have all the maps, so I think this one is a better option. My concern was that it might not be unique enough, but I still think this is a solid option, and if you don't plan on selling the character you can just combine different textures to create a new one.

In the end, I decided to risk it and use one of the multichannel texture sets from Texturing XYZ. They are very high res and have all the maps I needed, and DAZ itself used them to create Victoria 8.1 and some of the new characters so I knew they should work.

The Plan

What I had to do now was "simple", get the textures from XYZ , shape them into the genesis UV map and blend them with the rest, how hard could it be? Turns out that very hard...

The Pain

I will spare you the details of all the methods I tried and didn't work because this post is already too long and it might traumatize me. In the end what did work (sort of) was to set up a PSD file with the UV template for the face and the multichannel textures on top, setup smart filters and use puppet warp and liquify to shape it and then use the melanin and hemoglobin channels from the Utility map as masks to drive HUE, saturation and other filters to adjust the color and blend it with the rest of the body.
The smart filters are key, you can work on one layer and copy them to the others so details on the different maps line up perfectly.
For the eyes, which are custom too, the process is more or less the same.
Written like this it all sounds easy and straightforward, but near the end the iteration time was hideous: every time I spotted something wrong in the texture, tweaking it involved modifying dozens of effect layers in photoshop, exporting all the maps, rendering, and realizing I made it worse.

Fun fact, at one point Photoshop gave me an error saying that the file could not be saved, apparently by default Photoshop can't save PSD files that are more than 2.5GB in size, go figure.

The Result

I have to say that I'm a bit hesitant to show it as the character is not finished and the whole face has a custom sculpt that I want to improve, but it wouldn't be fair after making you read all that crap wouldn't it? So without further ado, the final result:


Go ahead and click on the image to make it bigger and decide for yourself if all that effort paid off.

As you can hopefully see, the face integrated nicely with the rest of the body (ears, neck), there are no seams or any glaring issues, at least none that I could find.
To get the detail I decided to use displacement maps for this close-up, but a normal map would work better when the camera is farther away, so I used XNormal to bake two normals, one with some secondary detail that I'm using here and another with the detail that's in the displacement for those other situations, I have to work a bit more on that one though.

The End
And thus we arrive at the end of my journey through the joys of texturing, thank you for your time.
Feel free to ask any question down below and if you have experience texturing please share your wisdom with us.

 

[Willibrordus]

I've not done anything this elaborate yet but I did edit a skin to have different colour markings.
The Original skin has White markings and I wanted to have them be dark in order to make a bad version of that character.
I originally wanted black markings but then found that not contrasting enough with the black outfit so I settled on red instead.

I imported the skintextures with markings in photoshop and repainted them black to allow the subsurface colour red shine through.


this top one still has the unmodified skin on.
Below is the edited version. Meet Custom Darth Ahsoka

 

[Willibrordus]

This is the art I made with that custom skinned Character. (I have posted it in the Daz skills thread)

 

[NanoGames]

View attachment 1378385
This is the art I made with that custom skinned Character. (I have posted it in the Daz skills thread)

It looks really good! Great atmosphere.

This is the stuff I want to see, modifying existing textures goes helps a lot creating unique looks.

 

[osanaiko]

Go ahead and click on the image to make it bigger and decide for yourself if all that effort paid off.

I am blown away by how good this looks. You may be able to see flaws, but I would suggest that is only because you are so close to the project and know what to look for. As an outsider, this character render would easily be judged a similar quality to the best skins available on the official store, and significantly better than many products that are sold commercially.

Well done!

 

[NanoGames]

I am blown away by how good this looks. You may be able to see flaws, but I would suggest that is only because you are so close to the project and know what to look for. As an outsider, this character render would easily be judged a similar quality to the best skins available on the official store, and significantly better than many products that are sold commercially.

Well done!

Thank you very much! I really appreciate the kind words.

It is true that having spent so much time creating it now I can't help but focus on the things that I'd like to improve. The problem is that my workflow is so bad that adjusting any detail on the skin at this point might take me half an hour before I can see it applied to the character, and I don't know if I want to do a new one.

That's why I created this thread, maybe someone shares a technique that helps me improve it or at the very least I can share what I learn so other people can avoid making the same mistakes I made.

I'm particularly interested in learning about people that create textures from normal photos or manually painting them, and how do they create the roughness and normal maps so they align with the diffuse.

 

[osanaiko]

Thank you very much! I really appreciate the kind words.

It is true that having spent so much time creating it now I can't help but focus on the things that I'd like to improve. The problem is that my workflow is so bad that adjusting any detail on the skin at this point might take me half an hour before I can see it applied to the character, and I don't know if I want to do a new one.

That's why I created this thread, maybe someone shares a technique that helps me improve it or at the very least I can share what I learn so other people can avoid making the same mistakes I made.

I'm particularly interested in learning about people that create textures from normal photos or manually painting them, and how do they create the roughness and normal maps so they align with the diffuse.

I'm afraid I don't have the technical skills or experience here to give any help.

But surely, your problem of a slow work loop for editing / exporting / re-rendering is exactly what Substance Designer/Painter is supposed to improve?? Perhaps investing some time into learning that tool would allow you to get the results you want much faster? Your existing knowledge of photoshop is clearly good for making something that looks great, but possibly it is not the right tool for the job.

 

[NanoGames]

I'm afraid I don't have the technical skills or experience here to give any help.

But surely, your problem of a slow work loop for editing / exporting / re-rendering is exactly what Substance Designer/Painter is supposed to improve?? Perhaps investing some time into learning that tool would allow you to get the results you want much faster? Your existing knowledge of photoshop is clearly good for making something that looks great, but possibly it is not the right tool for the job.

I might give substance painter another chance, I just wasn't able to get good results out of it, textures didn't look as sharp as I wanted them to. But yeah, maybe is just learning the tool and overcoming those issues.

If I decide to do another one I will make sure to post it here, maybe with more detailed images of the process.

 

[rotebete]

I am also interested in this topic, but I am even worse at creating something

Recently I found an interesting tutorial:

You must be registered to see the links

It shows how to create a skin (face) with a procedural workflow of Substance Painter.

For me it was even too hard. But maybe it will help someone who can break it down for us

 

[NanoGames]

I am also interested in this topic, but I am even worse at creating something

Recently I found an interesting tutorial:

You must be registered to see the links

You must be registered to see the links

It shows how to create a skin (face) with a procedural workflow of Substance Painter.

For me it was even too hard. But maybe it will help someone who can break it down for us

Will definitely check this one out, very interesting. If it's procedurally generated this could probably be combined with the textures we already have to enhance or customize them. Looks very promising, thank you!

 

[Synx]

I have been working on a custom skin as well for a while. Not for DAZ but for blender Eevee (the real time renderer so renders take like 10-20 seconds) as i want to make a lot of general animations to create a more active feeling world.

I started at the same point as you; textures from XYZ. They are great but hard to fit to a Daz model. I tried the puppet warping + liquefy method but god that was an horrible experience. Picked up substance painter after and I can highly recommend it.

My current workflow is starting in Photoshop and Puppet warping the textures to the DAZ UV place very roughly. Mainly to get the large zones like chin, cheeks, and forehead into the right place. I import those in Substaince painter as base layer. Then i use the projection tool to paint in the harder areas like the eyes, mouth, ears, etc. With the projection tool you can directly paint a texture on your model which makes adding those harder areas much easier compared to the liquefy tool.

After that its exporting them back to photoshop and separate all the different displacement and utility channels. I have done this a couple times so far but the current version I got of the XYZ textures transformed to the DAZ UV's looks pretty good/clean, so my plan is just to use those for every single character as base layer. Then add a bunch of other DAZ textures on top of that and mix and match.

This is my current result. Far from perfect but so far it looks pretty good, especially since its rendered in Eevee in like 12 seconds:



The hair has some weird artifact i'm trying to get rid off, the eyelashes/eyebrows could prob use some work, some make-up around the eyes wouldn't hurt, and maybe some more details here and there as some of the render setting seems to wash them out a bit, but overall i think I'm on the right track.

The only downside of using this method is I'm having an hard time to get detailed textures for other parts of the body, especially hands and feet. DAZ doesn't really have them and if you use a displacement/normal map from a different source most (or most likely all) DAZ diffuse maps won't line up well with the deeper lines on the knuckles/palm.

 

[NanoGames]

I have been working on a custom skin as well for a while. Not for DAZ but for blender Eevee (the real time renderer so renders take like 10-20 seconds) as i want to make a lot of general animations to create a more active feeling world.

I started at the same point as you; textures from XYZ. They are great but hard to fit to a Daz model. I tried the puppet warping + liquefy method but god that was an horrible experience. Picked up substance painter after and I can highly recommend it.

My current workflow is starting in Photoshop and Puppet warping the textures to the DAZ UV place very roughly. Mainly to get the large zones like chin, cheeks, and forehead into the right place. I import those in Substaince painter as base layer. Then i use the projection tool to paint in the harder areas like the eyes, mouth, ears, etc. With the projection tool you can directly paint a texture on your model which makes adding those harder areas much easier compared to the liquefy tool.

After that its exporting them back to photoshop and separate all the different displacement and utility channels. I have done this a couple times so far but the current version I got of the XYZ textures transformed to the DAZ UV's looks pretty good/clean, so my plan is just to use those for every single character as base layer. Then add a bunch of other DAZ textures on top of that and mix and match.

This is my current result. Far from perfect but so far it looks pretty good, especially since its rendered in Eevee in like 12 seconds:

View attachment 1393023

The hair has some weird artifact i'm trying to get rid off, the eyelashes/eyebrows could prob use some work, some make-up around the eyes wouldn't hurt, and maybe some more details here and there as some of the render setting seems to wash them out a bit, but overall i think I'm on the right track.

The only downside of using this method is I'm having an hard time to get detailed textures for other parts of the body, especially hands and feet. DAZ doesn't really have them and if you use a displacement/normal map from a different source most (or most likely all) DAZ diffuse maps won't line up well with the deeper lines on the knuckles/palm.

This looks superb!
I also use Blender but only used Eevee for architectural stuff, not so much characters. Using it for animations sounds like a great idea, specially if you want to longer ones or a lot of them because it is really fast.

I will definitely look into painter, I really wanted to learn to use it but since it was bought by Adobe my enthusiasm just disappeared. There's still a version on Steam but I'm sure that one won't get updated, or they might even remove that version altogether because Adobe loves subscriptions.

Anyway, the projection tool looks like a better solution to do this kind of work and Painter gives you realtime feedback, so it should be miles better than my workflow, thanks for sharing your work with us.

 

[Synx]

I will definitely look into painter, I really wanted to learn to use it but since it was bought by Adobe my enthusiasm just disappeared. There's still a version on Steam but I'm sure that one won't get updated, or they might even remove that version altogether because Adobe loves subscriptions.

Yeah i feel ya. I'm lucky my work has a full Adobe license running and since Covid and working from home, they allowed all the adobe stuff to be installed on personal PCs and use their license. Otherwise I would look into the steam version or honestly just pirate it. You cant seem to get a subscription for just substaince painter anymore, seems you need to get some complete 3D package which is lame (and totally Adobe). It's a good program but 130 bucks is a lot of money as well for a program you might not use a lot. Especially if your just starting out and not sure you will actually stick with it.