How do I make Animal Scales, Fur, and Feathers

Considering I am using Nomad to help me draw my characters better. Is there a way to make so scales, fur and feathers. Rough and smooth? Spike or armor like? I made my character that is a dragon and I’m still messing around the designs. But I wonder if there is a way to do them.

Scales are generally treated as a variant of textures. Textures can be achieved using Alphas.

Pixologic has a trove of free Alphas, but they’re all in a PSD format. You’ll need to convert to JPG before dropping them into Nomad’s alphas folder. I had to relaunch Nomad for them to be seen properly in the app.

Fur / hair

Feathers

The latter two would be for viewing/rendering only. I’m pretty sure none of the 3D resin printers I’ve been wrangling will heed 2D objects. IOW, only the base watertight mesh gets recognized by the printers’ slicing software. If a print is the end-goal, best practice would be to approximate the look via alpha textures.

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