Hi, this is an iguana I began recently. I still need to add spikes and fix up a lot of things, and then texture it.
Too cool! Good job on the scales around the face. The scales of the body seem to be lacking depth and form in comparison, really they’re just bumps at this point. I would put the same care into them as well, but hey, this is just a work in progress. Maybe even create some more scale alphas to stamp around. Otherwise this is a great start with realistic iguana anatomy. Can’t wait to see the finished product! 
Nice sculpt. I look forward to see your next update
Stargo
yeah, I am wanting to do a gecko or lizard myself. the scales are really colorful and irridescent.if you go to 3dsk you’ll see some good reference material.
Also attenborough ‘Life in cold Blood’ has some excellent reference.
I would start texturing at this stage and progress the scuplt through that as a guide. Did you use zspehers for base or the stock lizrd ztl or what?
Good work anyways.
Would you be willing to share ztl so we can all help?
Thanks jamespthornton- i’ve sort of neglected the scales of the body as I’m not too sure to go about them. The scales on the face are more prominent and bigger so I just sculpted those without alphas…
Thanks stargo!
Thanks floatingworld- I made a pretty simple base mesh in maya, it’s kindv’e wack because I thought I was going to extract the spike from the back. I’ve started texturing in zbrush, it’s my first attempt at polypainting. I’m thinking it might be easier to take it into photoshop at this point.
To all- I’m wondering how you would make the scales for the rest of the body. Would you use a texture and not actually change the geometry, or use an alpha and try to make the pattern that way. I’m wondering because looking at references, each dot (scale) appears in rows so they’re pretty organized, which is unlike the face. Suggestions most welcome.
[attach=110780]color1ig.JPG[/attach]
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To be honest, I don’t quite get why polypainting is so great if you are using photoreference. Youhave to divide the mesh so many times, it’s ridiculous,whereas the traditional method of bringing the photoref into photoshop gives you the max resolution with a little adjustment. Of course, if you want to try directly painting the textures on using the spray paint layering etchnique that scott spencer uses, you can combine these and create a sense of diffusion and translucency but for regular features such as scales, I don’t think this is appropriate. For medium frequency detail, I would use alpha brushes cerated by yourself from source ref, then for high freq detail rely in photoref bump.
Very nice model. I was wondering, how did you make the scales in the face? I’m working on a snake model at the moment and I’m having a really tough time making the scales look neat…
Floatingworld, thanks for the advice. I think you’re right about using photoshop for high frequency texturing. Maybe you can help me out: as I hit the color > texture button, to transfer the rough polypainting to my uvmap, I got a strange result as some of the painted polys got misplaced on the map. It’s pretty strange, as I’m not sure why it would place the face scales for instance where the belly should be.
Yoroba, thanks a lot. For the scales, I roughed out each scale individually with the standard brush, then used the flatten brush to make it less round. The scales on the face are pretty big, so i thought it made sense to make each one that way.
Not sure without seeing settings, but first off - are you using maximum subdiv level? Because if you want to polypaint, you should do this to get correct - pixel-to- pixol ratio. otherwise, is your uvmap clean with no overlapping? You can check this by pressing ‘check uv’ under texture roll out. Before you employ color to texture, you must first create texture map, setting appropriate size, say 4096 by 4096, then press fill object under color menu, with mrgb on. Also it looks like you have guv tile mapping on. That uv mapping doesn’t look right to me - doesn’t seem to follow topology.
Well you have yourself quite a challenge:
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Hey thats great like the detail around the face and the texture as well.Coloring not so much.
Thanks floatingworld- I had been painting on the highest subd level, and set the map to 4096, but it still came out funky. I think I need to do some tests with it, but it’s weird because I know I’ve created textures that way before. Thank you for the advice tho; it’s very appreciated.
Thanks jamespthornton- I’ll try using the alpha you created, as it looks pretty accurate. I think it would look a lot better with actual sculpting as well, I haven’t had a chance to work on it in a couple days, maybe tonight when i get out of work. Thanks for taking the time to post and try to help me out.
Neueoic thanks. Yea I’m not a fan of the coloring at this point either.
I know how you feel, I’ve been so busy with business that I’ve barely even used my new ZBrush OSX that I’ve been dying to own for months.
Regarding the alpha, I would clean it up in Photoshop with hard edge smudging and brushing. Also, you can use a lower focal shift in ZBrush to blur the edges, so you don’t stamp squares, or fade out the edges in Photoshop. You can also blur or sharpen it in the alpha menu of ZBrush, and do some other adjustments to get some variation.