Octopus colour detail stage 1

There's two layers of colour detail here. The first is a layer of scales or pigment sacks added using projection paint on an 8bit version of the small scales stencil image. These don't line up with the geometric detail particularly so it only works as a base layer.

The second layer is a set of hand painted scales that are painted on the most prominent large scale details. It didn't take all that long, but it would certainly have been quicker if Mudbox had cavity masking.

At this stage I only painted them in white. I can always use this layer as a mask for more complex colour in Photoshop later.

The ambient occlusion layer is overlaid here. It certainly helps bring out the sculpted detail.

Octopus base colour

This is the first few layers of base colour for the octopus. There's still a very long way to go.

The bottom layer is a mass of red and blue veins over a dark base. You probably can't see much of that at this stage as the top layer is 100% opaque. Then the base colour is overlaid with a rough sponge stamp.

I haven't touched the inside of the tentacles really. The brushes go through to the far side of the objects so I'll just end up painting all over them by mistake. I'll do them later with smaller brushes.

Second pass at ambient occlusion

Now I've added the larger scales I needed to recalculate the Ambient Occlusion texture. This is the result.

Actually it's three texures with different filter sizes layered on top of each other. Each accentuates different scale details.

This resulting texture will be used as the top layer of the textures over all the colour layers. If I could I'd set it to a multiply layer, but Mudbox doesn't support blend modes for textures yet. Instead I'll have to take this greyscale image and use it as the transparency of a black image. That's a bit of a pain as it's very difficult to see what the results will be in Photoshop. The sooner Autodesk get around to adding blend modes for texture layers the better as far as I'm concerned.

Octopus Large Scales

I added some larger scales around the eyes and base of the body of the octopus so it doesn't look so uniform.

These were made by sculpting several scales onto a subdivided plane and extracting them as a texture. I used this image as a stencil to sculpt them back onto the body. That way I didn't have to sculpt them all individually. Some like the ones around the eyes were sculpted by hand.

Ambient Occlusion test renders

Here's a set of grabs of the rendered Ambient Occlusion maps. The viewport has flat lighting to see them more clearly.

I can see from these that there's a few flat spots I've missed when applying the surface scale stamp. I'll fix them up when I apply the larger scales. I'll have to re-render the AO maps then anyway.

Octopus Sculpting stage 3- Surface Detail

Here's the surface detail stage of the octopus sculpt. I plan to make an additional stamp for larger scales for some areas as it's a bit uniform in some areas.