Saturday was an entirely more relaxed and sensible affair though. It started off with some texturing. I want to make some textures for the dragon scales and I get a chance to experiment with some photo's I took last year.

I was in Somerset -visiting my girlfriend where she was working for the summer- and there was an incredible clay beach nearby. Crap for sunbathing and similar beachy things, but there were some incredible patterns in the clay. So organic I had to take a load of shots - these two were some of the least weird textures..

Now, because the Dragon is a creature of fantasy I don't have to stick with the regular reptile scales for textures- I thought the top picture here was already half way to being dragon scales.

I cross-bred the top with the second texture (right) rougher secondary detail. Then I applied hue/stauration levels and a curves level in Photoshop. Dragon scales nearly done already!

(images are cropped from about 15% of original images)

Now for the real job of texturing. The first task is to separate all the areas of texture. This is a process known as "skinning" in realtime character work.. the joy of working with high res images and models is that you can have as many layers, textures and texture resolutions as you like. for ease I decide to break the head into 5 areas:

The Main Face; the Horns (rear), the Horns (minor), the Inner Mouth, and Top/Bottom

Now, the areas are not just marked out as separate materials, but also detached as separate objects for two reasons;

One is to ease mapping. The best way is to select the object and "Unwrap UVW". From here you can edit the UV's and use "flatten mapping". If the area is a separate object it's easier to edit the UV's without all the extra polygons from other materials in the Edit UVW window. It can be confusing enough as it is!

The second reason is to generate a base texture. To do this I "render to texture" using global illumination on a very very weak setting. This give visual feedback into where things are on the main object (you can see where you're painting in the texture in photoshop!) To use the "render to texture" feature in Max, each object can only have one texture - thus the separation.

Once all the base textures are ready, the objects can be attached together again and the vertices welded.

mouse-over: area separation

Before going any further (in fact, this is before "render to texture") I put a checker texture into each of the texture bitmaps to make sure there's no untoward stretching. It's best to do this properly to avoid a real pain later.

Stretching textures are very hard to fix.

Everything's just fine with the texture layout so it's just a matter of painting the bitmaps in Photoshop. This is the best part for me - I love painting textures. For now I'm just going to concentrate on the bump maps and make sure they're working fine before progressing to the colour and specularity.

Bump mapping is a real reward as it compliments the shape of the modelling and add that final touch. I usually check these as the visible maps in Max just to make sure everything's lining up OK before rendering.