Actor's Studio, lesson 3 - Pallas texturing

Pallas head model (top), shader (bottom), texturing (right)

Textures can evoke tactility, temperature, and odor. A geometric mesh becomes something more relatable.

These textures were created by projecting high-resolution photographs - of skin, hair, and fabric - onto the geometry. This is just a first pass. The textures will continue to be developed, depending on requirements of design, animation, and rendering. For now, they're good enough to continue onto rigging. Again, this is intended to be a simplified model of medium detail, so I avoided painting pores into the bump and specular maps, and other meticulous details.

textures for Pal's head: diffuse, bump, specular, roughness

Pal's head uses a roughness map. Dark areas of a roughness map represent a smoother part of the surface, with sharp reflections and highlights. Bright areas of the roughness map represent abrasive or porous parts of the surface, with blurred reflections and diffused highlights. Some rendering systems use "glossiness" instead of roughness, which is simply the inverse of roughness. IE, you'd need to invert your roughness maps to use them as glossy maps.

Usually, I create a roughness map by simply inverting an instance of the specular image file. For most surfaces, this is probably an acceptable technique. However, it's not specific enough for human faces, which audiences instinctively scrutinize more carefully than other surfaces.

Pallas' hand

Additional textures will be needed, somewhere down the line, for rigging skin and clothing animation, including wrinkling and blushing/pallidity. These textures will be layered images, rigged in such a way that their opacity is increased when a surface is wrinkling or changing color.

next: Pallas body rig