Hidatsa Character - Textures 2

Next day, I went over all the materials again and added more definition to them. I tried stopping myself from adding wear and dirt for now so I could have some nice bases to work on. At this point everything was still looking quite generic but I am quite happy with the variations I got from just the bases. Also, after getting some feedback I tweaked some of the colors, like the saturated red on her belt because it was drawing too much attention.

For the patterns that I added on the clothing, I tried to replicate some native american motifs. I knew that all the patterns have a particular meaning in their culture and tried to keep that in mind when adding them, but it isn't completely historically accurate. The symbols on her dress, armguard, bracelets and accessories are taken from resources I could find online and I tried keeping them relevant in away to the theme of this character, so most of them would symbolise something like a life journey for freedom and happiness, encountering difficulties and heading towards a future goal while keeping in touch with a past home. Everything is very rough but those were main meaning of the symbols that I added, even though the story would be a bit of a stretch. Also, for the face paint I wanted to keep it really simple, as I thought that covering her face too much wouldn't look that good. The only thing that I added were red paint where her hair parts, which I read was a common thing native american women would do and it was just something considered aesthetically beautiful (like make up for modern women), the red line on her chin which is more warrior like and white dots near her eyes, again just for the aesthetic. 

Now that I had all the bases in place, I could move on and add wear to her clothes. I went over all the materials again and added things like, dirt, scratches, edge wear, stains, material discoloration and such. I had all of those on multiple layers which I stacked together to get the effect that I wanted. Also, added more details with a height map to the materials, to refine the material texture better. 

Also, I added some dirt to her skin as well, as I though that it would make sense that some areas wouldn't be completely clean, like her hands for example. At the end, I added a sharpening filter over all the materials, to get the details to show a little better, and a fill layer to reinforce the AO map, then went on and hand painted the transition between the materials where the AO wasn't showing enough.

For the quiver I looked up some native american designs to try and make it more interesting, and added a fabric pattern and some dream catchers, on which I will add more feathers and hanging pieces strands directly in 3ds Max, because I will just recycle the parts that I already have. I kept the bow quite simple and only added some fabrics where the grip would be and some carvings. 

Also, added some patterns on the shoes but kept them quite subtle so they wouldn't draw the attention over there. 

At this point I was overall pleased with how the textures were looking and the only changes that I made were after I set up the lighting in Marmoset, which were small color and roughness changes. 

In total, it took me roughly 3 days to get to this look.

My next focus is rigging and skinning, which is more time consuming rather than complicated. I also want to add some hair cards to give more variation to the hair if I have time before the deadline.