REALISTIC Creature Texturing Painting Tutorial Using Mari – By Zak Boxall

My name is Zak and I’m a texture artist in the VFX industry. I wanted to make this creature texturing course to help people wanting to start out in the vfx industry. I carefully structured this course to be of the highest of quality that you’d expect as a full standalone creature texturing module in a university.

This is by far the most extensive curated tutorial I’ve ever done and I’m so excited to finally release it for you.

What is this course?

This is a pre-recorded online texturing course, with each step recorded and structured into bite size chapters. Going from preparing a model for texturing – through to exporting final textures out of Mari.

In the VFX industry it’s almost impossible to be given an asset without photo reference to work towards, and this course will focus on creating photo-realistic textures. We won’t be creating these textures from our head, we’ll be referencing photography though the entire process to give us direction and inspiration. We’ll talk extensively on how to break down this photography and building the textures based on your own observations, to come up with a plan for how we will approach the asset.

Additionally we won’t only be trying to paint aesthetic textures, but doing so in a way where we are able to plan for any eventuality. This could be a model change, UV change or client requests. Essentially have great looking textures, whilst being flexible to changes.

This means that we need to approach this asset with the mindset of incorporating the right balance of technical and artistic skills. We’ll work in a structured way using the incredibly powerful node graph where we will mix the efficiency of procedural methods to establish non-destructive, full coverage to ensure we can make changes on-the-fly to account for any changes, but with the ability to art direct every layer for custom paint work.

This will ensure you finish the course not only with technical skills of how to use the software, but with the confidence to take everything you’ve learnt to tackle your own creatures for that killer, industry ready showreel piece.