Dryad, acrylics on A4 paper.

Apollon Akesios, the avarter of evil. I painted this in acrylics and chalk pastels on A4 paper.

Here are some hard-surface material that I painted today in Corel Painter. I’m very happy with the crackled bark.

Painter has great brushes, especially I love the Sargent brush, and various mixers and smudges. On the down side, the software crashes a lot more than Photoshop. It is also more limited in masking. The neat circle around the material is a mask, and in Photoshop it’s possible to group all layers and mask them. This seems to be not possible in Painter, or I haven’t figured out yet how to do it. The workaround is to copy my circle mask to all layers, a bit tedious but it works.

Next I need to make some studies of water and other transparent and translucent things. These will be harder because they don’t follow the standard light & shadow model of solid objects like rock and wood.

And here’s a 3D material for an ancient wall, which I made in Substance Designer. This is procedurally generated from a bunch of nodes.

The maps that Substance outputs can be imported directly to UE4, Unity or Arnold. It’s interesting that there are two rendering models – one which uses Roughness & Metalness (Unreal), and another that uses Specularity & Glossiness (Unity). It seems to be that Roughness & Metalness is the new way preferred by most engines.

I sculpted this dude in ZBrush as anatomy exercise. Overall, I’m happy with the result. To push it further he needs more detail and resolution, materials and texturing. I’ll delve into materials later this year.