How can I texture and look develop a leather material?

Rupert Moore, UK Fady replies Hopefully as I explain my workflow and the techniques I used to finalise my warrior character, you should get a good idea about how to lookdev and texture a leather material. The warrior project was a personal project with the aim of practising and pushing myself and my workflow out of my comfort zone. I intended to go beyond what I am used to do in my work to date, which is sticking to a limited number of maps and not going above a certain resolution for each map.

With this project I had a goal, which was to reach a maximum resolution without getting into the nightmare of blurred textures in a close-up camera situation. Thankfully I succeeded in doing so, however I had to paint almost 254 UV patches in 4K map size. That ended up totalling 1016 maps between Diffuse, Spec, Bump and Displacement maps.

I use Vector Displacement maps as they are more accurate and less hassle when it comes to setting up

From Zbrush I exported three sets of maps: 32bit Floating Displacement maps, Vector Displacement maps and Normal maps. I use Vector Displacement maps as they are more accurate and less hassle when it comes to setting up. They’re also faster when exporting from Zbrush.

The other types of Displacement maps are used in conjunction with Bump maps, in order to give extra accent to the details. Normal maps are used to guide me through the texturing process. In addition to this, I also use AO maps as these are very efficient and also help guide me through the process, as well as adding extra dimension to flat textures.

During this project I had to tackle the process of building a solid leather texture and shader that would form the majority of this character’s costume (almost 90 per cent). Using Arnold as my main render engine led me to investigate further the leather material properties ( Diffuse, Roughness, Specular, and so forth).