This instructables covers a beginner's basics on how to digitally paint a character facial skin color map in a 2d application. When people ask me where to start when first learning how to texture a character they've made, I tell them to keep it simple by learning how to paint color maps in a 2d application such as Photoshop before learning how to create more advanced texture maps such as Normal and Roughness Maps.

This was due to rendering hardware capabilities at the time.

Prior to what we see today in most 3d video games, game based models were designed with only one type of texture map: a color map. A variety of techniques and tools are used to make textures: painting by hand in a 2d package such as Photoshop, photo-manipulation, 3d scanning with a photogrammetry tool, painting in 3d directly on models, creating procedurally in a node-based material editor, baking image data from one model to another, etc.Multiple texture types are often created and used to control different parts of the shader, such as a Normal map or a Specular color map.

Commonly referred to as 'maps', textures work in conjunction with Shaders and Materials in a 3d engine or 3d software to produce the final colored result of a 3d model. Texturing refers to the act of producing 2d images for use with 3d models.

Free skin texture for blender