What you'll learn

When tasked with creating textures for a creature, one of the first things you should do is examine the various surfaces that the creature has. Are they flabby skin? Maybe they are rough and plate-like. With this tutorial, we will begin by examining our mantis asset and breaking him down into texture phases by painting a mask. From here we will focus just on the soft fleshy areas, and really make them look like skin. Next we will move on to his hard surface armor pieces and create the color textures for those. By following along and creating the textures for these two areas you will learn how to use the Paint Through Tool, adjustment layers as well as various masking techniques. From here we will move on and begin to create a specular map for our creature. Then, before learning how to export our maps out of MARI, we will take a moment and learn how to update our normal map quickly and easily with some of our painted detail. After finishing this training, not only will you have created textures for this creepy, crawly mantis asset but you will also have added some great tricks to your MARI texturing toolbox. Software required: MARI 2.5v1.