Plastic Textures - Shadow Urtheart

This tutorial will show you how to create basic plastic textures that have a slight shine to them, similar to the ones found in the Megaman series.

This style of texturing derives from the style of early Megaman titles where his helmet and buster look to be made of a blue plastic. You need to have a basic understanding of how lighting works before attempting to use this tutorial.

For this technique to work properly you need 3 tones above your base tone. The lightest tone should be near to white, though still be recognizable as your colour, and then gradually going back down to your base tone.

We'll start with flat objects. Depending on where the light is positioned will depend on how far the shine will go. To start we'll use the top right corner as the light source for the moment.

With your base colour already on the object use your lightest tone to colour how far the center of the light would hit, since the light is on the corner of the object, it won't travel too far, but it can start at the edge. Note that since the light is hitting the side, it should not spill onto the front face.

Use the next tone down and shade around the first highlight, since we are working to a corner make it either the same width or slightly less that of the first highlight.

Now use your last highlight tone to go around the second highlight. This again should be either the same or less width than the previous highlight (depending on how much spill the light would cause. This example shows a light with a moderate spill.

You can make your spill as small as one pixel width to demonstrate a really focused light. Don't forget to put a shadow in areas light will not reach at all (in this case the bottom face of the shape)

If the light does not face a corner you will need to create the highlights slightly differently. Start off with your lightest tone again, this time making a slightly circular highlight.

Use a similar technique as with the corner and go around the first highlight, however this time make sure the highlight is no more than half of the width of the first highlight.

Use your last highlight making it either equal or less than the previous one, and again go around it making the last highlight. This creates a spotlight effect of where the light hits.

For creating a light hitting directly from the front you can use a similar technique to the side.

To create a light shine coming from the side first of all create your lightest tone.

When using your second highlight you need to make the parts closest to the light source thinner than that further away, this creates the spill going in one direction greater than the other, giving a small sense of the light being tilted.

Do the same again with your last tone to complete the effect.

When using circular objects, the highlights must follow the curvature of the object, again start by using your lightest tone and curving it round with the sphere.

Use a similar technique to the tilted lighting and create smaller shades on the furthest side of the sphere, and bigger shades on the closest to give the object much more of a curving effect.

Creating larger patches of your lightest shade with smaller patches of your other shades will give the plastic a sense of being closer to the light.

Using these techniques you can apply them to a character to give them a shiny plastic style look, or to give certain items a plastic feel, and it can be combined with other shading techniques to increase detail or shading the pixel art. Here both Sonic's head and shoes have been given a plastic style shine to them.