Old Hand texturing advice needed

[Macaco]

Hi all,

I have to texture this hand mesh as if it were an old hand, I have some ideas in my head on how to do it, but I'm not sure, so I would like you to tell me how how you do it.

How would you unwrap the mesh?
How would you texture it? Diffuse, bump, displacement, specular... ? any procedural?

Thanks a lot!

[Vertigo]

Well, first of all this should be in the help section.

But...

To unwrap the mesh (I'm assuming you use max and will talk using Max terms) I would do a two planar maps. One on the polys making the top side of the hand and one on the bottom. You'll have to go into the unwrap modifier to adjust it a little to get rid of all the stretching issues.

To paint the texture is really up to you. Me, I prefer to take the image of the UVs into photoshop. Create a base layer with the general color of the hand. Then create a layer over that and fill it with 50% gray. Then put the gray layer on overlay and start using the dodge and burn tools on that gray layer. Which will lighten or darken the skin color. You can also just save out the gray layer on its own for use in the bump map.

How much experience do you have doing this stuff so far? Did any of what I just said make any sense? If you need me to clarify more you can PM me here on threedy or you can IM me. My aol screen name is mcmegaman

[JayEdwards]

Hi Macaco
I've just posted a reply to Woody on another link, hes doing :character Natalie. I have put pic on there of a hand I built and textured at work. I took some really hi res pics of a colleages hands unwrapped the mesh in Maya and used Mayas 3d paint tool just for the edges of the uv's seams where they, opened the uv snapshot and saved textures in photoshop and popped it together very carefully right down to the nearest pixels as to avoid the seams overlap, then using the color map as a guide converted that to greyscale, then adjusting brightness and contrast in photoshop and a bit of airbrushing, dodge and burn here and there to get rid of unwanted hi lites etc produced the bumps and the spec maps!! Then a fair bit of tweaking to achieve the desired result. There is no real shortcut, just lots of time and patience!!

[Nappa]

seeing how im new like less than a month of exp im pretty sure you could have added vains to your hand with bump map would have saved some polys there