nemezis design - what you see here, does not exist

Comparing procedural and painted texturing Article #1: Procedural This article is part #1 of my 2 articles to compare procedural and painted texturing. Next in  Part #2  I'll give my view on painted texturing, here we will have a look on procedural texturing the same asset. The intro of both articles is identical, but the conclusion of the series is included at the end of part #2. Intro I have been planning to write some articles honoring the 1st year I have spent in training until now to become a 3D artist. As subject of the first 2 essays I thought it would be appropriate to choose something which has given me the most thoughts in the past year. I have been fighting with a couple of things while getting to know different techniques for modeling, shading, lighting, rendering and post production, but from all these one of the few things currently, which seemed to me as a matter of preference instead of the actual progress of an artist on the learning path is...

I placed the previous gecko sculpt in an environment after finishing his details. It might be biologically imperfect, as this kind of animal lives in tropical rain forests, but I'll let this detail go as the animal itself is a mix of more subspecies as well. To be honest I have chosen a desert environment because the colors of green and beige go nicely with eachother :-) The rock is a recreation of a volcanic rock I have in my living room, originating from the lake Balaton. I used displacement an normal maps to get the details, based on the color map. The desert i made from an ocean type displacement (with dialing down the waves significantly) and adding some subtle tracks by sculpting. Finally post production added some depth of field, vignetting and chromatic aberration. So, I hope you like it :-)