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Painting your dino skin

Let's apply these ideas to our dino skin model! Create multi-resolution dinosaur skin patterns by blending 2D surfaces at different resolutions. Adjust scale size, base colors, and brightness, and use amplitude sliders for low, medium, and high resolution patterns. Then, test your design by rendering in 3D! Through experimentation, we can explore various looks and attempt to match reference art. You can find the interactive used in this program here.

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Video transcript

- In the previous exercise you created 2D Perlin noise at a single resolution. - But remember, our goal is multiresolution variation. Earlier we did this by adding 2D curves together. - [Lady Voiceover] Which means we can add surfaces together in the exact same way. - [Lady Voiceover] For example, imagine I took this surface and added it to this surface. It would result in this final surface. - [Lady Voiceover] We put together this tool to demonstrate how we blend 2D patterns at different resolutions. Let's start with a simple checkerboard example. Here is a low resolution, a medium resolution and a high resolution pattern. This is the result of blending these together. - [Lady Voiceover] And I see you've added amplitude sliders to define how much each resolution contributes to the final result. - [Lady Voiceover] Yes, exactly as before. You can adjust the base color too. - [Lady Voiceover] Very nice. Let's switch from this checkerboard to the random patterns used in the previous exercise. - [Lady Voiceover] Now we have the power to create a whole range of different results, in fact, I think we're ready to put this to work in our dino leg. - Let's do it. The final program extends what we did in the previous lesson. It generates a voanoy diagram as before, however now we can define the pattern applied to the skin and scales separately. - [Lady Voiceover] Oh, fun. Let me do a quick example. In this main panel, I can adjust the scale size as well as manually add and delete sides. We covered this in our first lesson. - [Lady Voiceover] Now jump over to the skin controls. Here you can adjust the base color as well as the brightness. Here we have three sliders, one to adjust the amplitude of the low resolution pattern, one for medium resolution and one for high resolution. - [Lady Voiceover] So there's a lot to play with here to get the look we need. - [Lady Voiceover] And the scale controls work the same way, allowing you to create an entirely separate look for the scales versus the skin. - [Lady Voiceover] Notice we have two base colors to select from here, color one defines the color of the smaller scales, and color two defines the color of the larger scales. So any given scale will take on a color in between your base colors. - [Lady Voiceover] We did the same thing in the previous lesson. This will allow us to get some natural color variations between the yellow and green Teah had indicated in her reference arc. - [Lady Voiceover] Exactly, and when you're ready to test out your pattern you can click here, Render in 3D. It will wrap your pattern around a simple leg to give you an idea of the finished look. - Looking pretty good already. Okay, we better stop here. Now it's your turn to take over these controls and create some of your own dino skin using, drum roll please, (drum roll) - See if you can match Teah's reference art but then go wild and see what else you can come up with. - What kind of things do you think about when you're designing skin for characters? - Well we think about a lot of different things but when you're looking at the bumpiness of each of the cells we felt like if we were using a curve that was flatter it gave the skin more of a look like it was being used more in a harder surface and therefore, it was an older character and having the cells be more round, it felt like it was a younger and fresher feeling skin. We ended up in the actual skin packet, we used a ramp from the center of the cell to the edge of the cell and then we defined what the curve was because we noticed that it made such a big difference between having that flat surface and the rounder curve. - Interesting. - So we were actually able to mathematically define the curve itself with just the patterns that we had inside each of the cells. - That's really cool. - Yeah (laughs).