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Essential Strategies for Hand Painting Textures in Mudbox

by Eddie Russell

When it comes to creating textures for assets, often times an artist will immediately reach for photographs to use. While this can be effective, so can painting all of your textures from scratch. Software required: Mudbox 2014.

What you'll learn

When it comes to creating textures for assets, often times an artist will immediately reach for photographs to use. While this can be effective, so can painting all of your textures from scratch. If you know how to paint the texture you are looking for by hand, then you don't have to spend time hunting down an image you can use. In this tutorial, we'll work step by step through texturing our warthog warrior chieftain asset using nothing but paint and brushes here in Mudbox. We'll get started by focusing just on the diffuse color and learning how we can begin to limit our color options by establishing a color palette. From here we'll learn an order to lay down our color in that can be used on any asset. We'll also learn how to structure the addition of detail as we progress through our textures. After wrapping up the diffuse map, we'll then move on and paint a bump map, specular map and even an incandescent map for our character. After finishing this training, you will have learned a workflow that you can use as you begin handing painting textures for your assets. Software required: Mudbox 2014.

About the author

Eddie began teaching creative professionals over ten years ago for Digital Tutors. In 2014 Digital Tutors was acquired by Pluralsight and he continued his focus on creating high quality training for artists in both the film and games industries. With a background in graphic design and illustration Eddie has always been focused on visual appeal. This can be seen through his courses in which he shares secrets for achieving production level quality for concept art, illustrations, textures, mater... more

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