Modeling dino skin

now that we're comfortable with the geometry of our cells let's flush out some details let's take a closer look at the shading packet notice each cell contains some skin around the edge with a scale sticking out in the middle we need to decide how far it is between the edge of the cell and the start of a scale this gap will expose the skin that the scales are growing out of in our program we can do this with this parameter called scale size if we maximize the scale size it covers all the skin which looks wrong so we need to pull it back slightly to get the gap we need that looks nice then notice the distance between the scales is the same everywhere right that's not very natural we've added a control here to vary the distance between scale edges that looks perfect next we need to make the scales look like they're extruding sticking out from the skin in our program we can control how far they stick out with this extrude parameter now we have a model for our Dino skin that we can start shading let's take a look at the shading packet and examine the color nodes it says each scale should have a slightly different color and the skin should be darker and leathery so we'll add some color controls here one for the skin and one for the scales to pull this off we have a really cool trick we define a range of colors from the smallest scale here to the largest scale here and now our program will color each scale based on its size so the smaller scales will look more like this color and the larger scales will look more like this color and all of the other scales will be somewhere in between that's very cool it saves us time because we don't have to define the color of each scale individually now see how the color varies very naturally according to the scale size we also add a preview button to give us a rough idea on how our pattern will look neat ok now it's your turn to use all these ideas to create your own Dino skin and in the final exercise we can use all the tools we introduce in this lesson and when you're happy with your creation move on to the next lesson where we'll be adding microscopic level detail this should really make our Dino leg look great do you always have a model first and then start shape most of the time we have the model first and then we realize that we need sometimes a little bit of a different geometry and we want to add certain details in certain certain areas of the model so sometimes we end up changing the model after shading has already started