Met Mat the Fly Frog

So here he is in his final, finished, complete, that's all folks version! The extension came at a great time for me because I got access to a much better computer so I was able to make a lot of refinements that just were not possible on my old laptop. Once I fixed the things that immediately jump out with my last renders and made a snag list and tried to clean him up and add some small details to finish him off. There are still a few little details that could have been cleaner if I had sculpted in another program, but overall I am delighted with how he has turned out and everything I have learned by being forced to just figure it out in painter.

I am happy to present my final renders and really delighted to have taken part in this competition. I have learned so much during this little frogs journey, things I knew in theory but had not put into practice, path tools, anchor points, proper use of multiple masks. Only using Painter right up to the Rendering point really helped me get my head around using the layer stacks to work much more like I would in Designer. Using Stager to render was also a first for me and it was great even with my old laptop barely able to keep up and then came the ah ha moment when I realised the point of compositing. All the little lessons I've learn along the way are really going to help me present more professional work in the future.

Hope you like him!!!

So after last update I export normal map, then replaced the project map with the exported one and re-baked the other maps so I could use detailed ambient occlusion and curvature maps to refine further. I've taken him as far as I think my laptop will let me and still be able to render without crashing  (new computer coming soon hopefully)

Now add final adjustments and hopefully get some nice renders.

For this update I will start by saying I've have been working solely in Painter, as I like many others thought it was against the rules to bake from a high poly model. I also thought creating textures in designer to bring in was against the rules. That said, I have decided to stick with what I have being doing as I am enjoying the challenge of just staying in Painter, I had decided at the start I did not want to import any alphas' and to try and build them like you would in Designer. I feel like its teaching me a lot and it is good to get outside your comfort zone.

 For this update I've been working on refining the forms using height maps, path tools, various blur filters to smooth it all out and height to normal filter. I also started working on the body skin using mask builder to create glossy black spots shape and then building up layers of different shades of blue using different cells textures to try and get that almost iridescent blue and drive the separate roughness between the two colours of skin.

Next step is exporting the Normal maps with all the detail I added and use them to replace the current Normal map in the project and then re-bake everything else so I can take advantage of curvature and ambient inclusion maps that have the details baked in.

I really love texturing and its taken me almost 40 years to discover that so I thought this was the perfect competition to put something out there.  My concept started with seeing some cool colourful frogs while scrolling through Instagram. I thought it would give me a chance to do something more organic than I have before. I haven't done a lot a characters before so that is another challenge to figure. 

So far I have started by gathering some reference of ideas and textures I would like to include, doing some very basic sketches to figure out how I can get some of the shapes to fit into Mat and blocking out some of the shapes to figure out the workflow.

These images really highlight the different qualities in the skin, glossy black and rougher coloured areas.

Ideally I would like to make some colour variations of the finished texture.

This was first trail of trying to 'sculpt' with painter I hadn't tried the paint along path tool yet and didn't realise how powerful a game changer it is.

Making some progress. Got more into the flow with body, next step is to apply some of that insight to the head.