3 - Texturing & Shading

After checking some reference about the bare skin composition, of real bears I started shading. According to most reference, bears have a gray-ish skin color. To my surprise, this seems to be on the darker side for polar bears compared to other bear species.

After sculpting allot of unnecessary detail to the skin of the head I started to create textures in Mari.

At a 8K resolution (probably way to much, but we can always downsize) I made a diffuse map and some additional masking maps for later use in X-gen. It took me a while to figure out how to work with Mari, since I had not used it before. However after about an hour I got the hang of it and I was astounded with the amount of polys it could handle without stuttering about.

Shading the head

When most of the textures were complete enough I started to experiment with the shaders that I had made. After some going back and forward between Maya and Mari I got a decent enough result. Allot of the work that I invested into the shading wont show in the final result however, I wanted to see if I was able to create a skin-shader that resembled my reference, and I was having allot of fun while doing it.

I shaded in V-ray with a couple of sss shaders and a few basic Vray shaders.

Nothing to fancy. I used some of the previous masks I made in Mari to gain control over the specular and reflection.

When I was satisfied with the result I could move to the next step witch was facing my old nemesis called X-gen, witch I wil talk about in my next post.