Mask Layers for Painting Hard Edges
Special thanks to Cheapalert for allowing me to use his texture as an example
Solid shapes as selectable masks to enhance sharp edges
The original texture, on the left, does fine to sell the look of the character at a distance. Unfortunately, up close it's all a blur, making the original 1024x1024 no more affective than a 256 in game. As this is game art, it never matter really what it looks like in an editor, but it has to look perfect in game.
For the middle image, I created a new layer and drew in the shape of the beak. (This allows me to Ctrl+click on that layer anytime in photoshop and have a selection for that shape.)
The idea is to make a solid shape layer for each shape of your character.
For example, with this character a mask for the beak, eye, nose, cheek, lower jaw. (It's good to have several shapes that do not touch in a single layer, later this will speed up the painting process.)
These shapes are often the same as the wireframe, which makes the process of making them fast!
The on the right shows the process at work. By having the selection ready to go,I was able to quickly smooth out the beak, and enhance the edges without affecting the surrounding texture. It is also very useful to expand, contract and invert this selection to get those perfect edge highlights clean.
Be careful not to over-do this process. The character should still retain overall shape.
Here's another example image of a 128 box, of using inverting and contracting of selection to get specific lighting edges:
This was all dodge and burn on greyscale, and a very basic example. I am much more in favor of color picking and painting.
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