Post #686139 by Gene S Morgan on Tue, Jul 16, 2013 6:55 PM

I showed a texture canvas before. I make these in painting apps. They can be anything you think might make interesting surfaces.

In a filtering program I turned the painted image into a 3D looking texture with an emboss filter. I use the ArtStudio app for this purpose. Emboss is a common filter that can be found in most image processing apps or computer programs. It is a simple but cool and very useful effect.

In the painting window you rub the texture on your sculpt.

When you are done it looks like this. Now you can add texture to a final image in a processing app like I illustrated at the beginning of this rather long post, but there is a key difference in the methods. When adding texture to an image file it lays flat over the top of your art. That is sometimes pretty cool, but rubbing texture on a sculpt actually lays the texture on the 3D image. Because of that the texture actually follows the shape of your sculpture. Take a good look and you will be able see what I mean. The texture looks more natural and realistic.

Looking at the tiki at different angles shows how your texture follows the curves of the sculpt.

It is important to know that the surface texture is not actually carved into the sculpt, but only painted on the surface. Still looks pretty real. One point that makes this 123D Creature app better than the others is that it is pretty easy to export OBJ files to your computer. You may remember that way back in this post I said that OBJ files were one of the universal 3D files which could allow you to open the file in another 3D app and refine it if you want. That can be very useful.