Skin texturing tutorials?

Miscellaneous Forums/General Discussion/Skin texturing tutorials?

Not often I usually post a topic unless I'm completely stoked about something, like the next best game (although 'puki' did beat me to Oblivion)...

Short version :

Any good tutorials out there (preferably for Photoshop7) with regards to texturing skin and what not? Also preferably not one of those tut's that takes alot of cheap shortcuts that seperates the "meh.." from "nice" or "wow".


Long Version :

Been artistically active the last couple months, doodling figures on the side when I'm not working on my Media Arts class project, which is to create a short film (doing traditional animation with a mix of 3d here, made some progress already, just honing my 2-point perspective abilities so my backgrounds stop looking like crap, oh and btw, animating frame by frame SUCKS solo, god, takes years...). On one of my "on the side" doodles which I'd liked to color, I'd like to try a hand at doing it as realistically as possible, I can already do simple things like eyes, shading with air-brush and what not so-so, but what's the point if the skin got no texture/life to it? Been googling but cant seem to find anything "good" regarding texturing skin (or let alone a good way to airbrush the shades/midtone/hightlights in), yet for some reason there's a billion tutorials regarding skin tones, which I already know.

Adding noise and knocking up the gaussian blur filter doesn't do it justice for me with regards to my own personal work. =\


Also, was curious if any of you with Photoshop CS would recommend it clearly over 7 besides the fact it's more recent? Got a b-day coming up next month, tempted to ask if I can upgrade from 7 to CS (beats paying full price) as a gift (well, unless the Max3D module comes out by then ;P), but unsure if the US$169.00 is worth it if there isn't much in terms of features added.

I recorded this fairly recently. It's short and hardly useful though.

http://noelcower.com/crap/zeerecording_re.7z

OOPS Double Post, see below for latest version..

Cheers

Garion

Found these

http://www.digitalmediadesigner.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=31082
http://www.creativemac.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=31220
http://www.digitalmediadesigner.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=31466
http://pages.zoom.co.uk/nick.towers/tutorials.html
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=3456005#post3456005

Cheers

Garion

I take it that's color-burn blend-style you chose for the shadows/highlights, then set to low-opacity? Read about using that, but couldn't quite get any nice results.

Apparently forgot about the flow when working on this little practice piece here, sure beats having a lowered opactiy on the brush. =\

Btw, what did you record that in? It appears it's encoded in a way where it only stores the changes between frames, looks handy for the sort of things you just did there, but without the 300mb+ uncompressed AVIs lying around.

[EDIT] Looks like Garion posted while I was making this, checkin yer links out now!

[EDIT2] Nothing much there, already seen the tut's that did the nice looking texturing at the end, but it relies on the authors selected custom brushes, which are for Photoshop CS only. =\

Genexi: No, I work primarily with a Normal blended brush with opacity set to my tablet's pen pressure.

I can't remember what I recorded it with, probably HyperCam or something like that, although I distinctly remember that crashing repeatedly..

In any case, I modified it by hand in VirtualDub so I could compress it further, modify the framerate, etc.

www.3d.sk

:D

Bleh, I need to practice more and figure this thing out....

Nothing like a crappy 10-second base line-art to build off of, the anatomy is all over the place. =\

Trying to get the skin done to the point where I dont even need the line-art on to see the shape of the figure. Using 5 layers atm,
line-art,
highlight (with blend mode set to color dodge),
midtone (flat color, normal blend),
shadows (color burn blend I think, or was it multiply... with low opacity),
shading (multiply blend, for actual shadows, which still needs work)

Looks like a rubber dummy, hmm........need to get those eyes tuned up soon too. Back to photoshop!