Adding more detail and making a texture look real takes some effort. The know-how is in a tutorial in this series: Creating a Realistic Head in Blender – part 08 – Clothing Textures. In the 8th of the series, CG Cookie Blender is working on the clothes. So, don’t let the title put you off.
You’ll notice Cycles and the Node Editor are not used in the early creation part. So, it is mostly an older workflow. Still, I found the video helpful on a number of levels.
I’m not that great at texture painting in 3D. I am trying to get better. So, when this video caught my eye, I checked it out. Blender Character Texture Painting (Play List).
Darrin Lile made the videos. I think he did a good job. There are six in the set, each about 15 minutes long. I found them clear and well explained.
I want to put way more detail in some of the stuff I am doing. But, this is a good basic ‘how to’ tutorial. The last video on baking and converting to Cycles is nice and clear.
Well done. Thanks Darrin.
New Work Notes has posted a rare tutorial:Â Metaverse ProTips: Building With Second Life Specular Maps. Well… I think rare for NWN.
This is a good tutorial on how specular maps are used in SL.
If you are playing with materials and trying to do transparency with specular maps, you may have run into problems. The problem came up on Plurk and Geenz, the one coding the project, replied in the comments on Inara Pey’s site.
Laverne Unit – April 10, 2013 at 16:56
After some testing, it seems that you can get specularity with diffuse maps with alpha masking, but not with diffuse maps with alpha blending. I don’t know what the intended behavior is, but that’s how it works at present.
Geenz Spad – April 10, 2013 at 17:36
The intended behavior (eventually) is that alpha blended objects will be able to support both normal mapping and specular mapping. Currently this is a work in progress, and due to its current state, it hasn’t been added to the viewer just yet.
 UPDATE: 4/10 – [16:02] Open Source Meeting – Geenz Spad:
So yeah, be on the lookout for materials on semi-transparent objects, it’s coming, I’ve even been working on it for the past week; don’t mope about it not being there too much.
There is information about the Materials System in the SL Wiki and Forum. The part I found interesting is the link to: Brief Considerations About Materials. This is an article by a teacher for a Post-Graduate Course on Game Art.
Materials Tutorial
The emphasis in this article is on Specular Maps. This is something many of us have little knowledge about. But, the specular map is going to be far more complex than the normal map. This is the area where knowledge will be key to making nice object textures or great object textures.