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Texturing - getting a "wet" look... tips?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

OK, I’ve sculpted a character in Zbrush, and have a pretty decent humanlike flesh texture applied to it. And I want it to look “wet” and a bit slimy, like the creatures in the movie “The Thing” and “Aliens”. So in Photoshop, I’ve used the select color range to grab a “fractalish” selection of the color map to make a broken-up grayscale specular map. However the model still has that “plastic” look to it when rendered in mental ray. I’ve got the spec falloff settings cranked up for a sharp hilight too. I’ve also tried procedural fractals in Maya multiplied into the color gain of the aforementioned spec map, added a hint of shader glow, etc.

If anyone has a “tried and true” method for getting a creature to look “wet”, please let me know. Maybe I’m going about it in the wrong way. Should I not be basing it off of the color map? Should I base it off of the bump map? Or paint the spec differently altogether using Zbrush’s spray tool for example?

Thanks…

#2

Can you post a section of the texture showing what you have? Then post a picture of what you’d like to get?

#3

I’ve actually got it working somewhat decently now… used the Zbrush spray brush to get an evenly splattered b&w texture, and just some shading network stuff to fine-tune it. The spray brush method seems like a much better way to go than sampling ranges from your color map, at least for a “wet” look.

I can post a sample of where I’m at and some goal reference images tonight.