I'll tackle these two at once. Let's throw up the ABSFM banner too:
Welcome to ABSFM where I tell you how to do things in the most haphazard way by telling you how I do things for the most part blah de blah here.
Let's talk about what you can use within SFM first for blood stuff. Here's what you can download to help you in your quest to make people look beat up as all fuck:
The SFMBeta files, which have blood splatters in them
This pooling blood model, which you can control the size of so you can tween it pooling
These liquid drops, which also includes a blood drop
These blood and bullet hole decals, which you can slap onto walls or a model IIRC
And these blood particles which are more realistic or if you want spilled tomato juice here you go
In the blood_trail.pcf file something or other in the /tf particles, I use the first thing it gives me because I like my blood like Bleach loves their blood - a fountain of ridiculousness
In post-editing and Photoshop, here's some things that come in handy:
Try out the Multiply/Darken options rather than just Overlay for your Layer Blending Modes. I usually use Multiply, but Normal works too if you're good with painting.
Paint splatter brushes or vectors, I don't care which ones, find something you like that is to your suiting
Likewise you can take those and then slap them onto an image file if you're making a reskin, which is also useful for getting blood onto your model
I usually follow at least one of three things for my injuries. They are as follows:
Blood
Bruises
Disheveled appearance
I don't usually break bones because I already do that when I try animating. Fuck the IK elbow bone.
Let's use that one Badass Femscout poster I did which I was a fan of in terms of over-glamourized injuries. It helps to use references when doing this if you're not sure where things go, similar to Photoshopping wrinkles, which is why sometimes my things might be too animu than realistic. Either way let's go under the cut for a breakdown of the above diagrams:
1st Picture - Bleeding: Leaking blood or cuts. This is usually done with a hard brush and then afterwards smudge tool'd edges downwards or at the very tip of the edges From here I've decided that she's received damage to her head, cuts all over open areas of her skin. Because there's bullet holes on her thigh/skirt I've added some trailing down her leg on the side as well. I like doing blood-stained teeth because of being punched in the mouth or something. Mask/erase parts where light shines.
2nd Picture - Blood-soaking: Clothes that have absorbed blood are gonna get your clothes dirty and soak in. I used a soft brush for this and then masked/erased out the edges, then smudge tool'd things to make it look like it was where it belonged. You can see where the blood trailing down her head sort of makes sense now, even though I didn't need to do this on that. I was careful as much as I could to make sure the darkness of my blood didn't pass the darkest shade of my SFM export - as with the 1st set of blood, I also erased/masked out parts where the backlight was.
3rd Picture - Bruising: Bruises are essential to showing that somebody got fucked up. Soft brush using a hue of black/dark purples at a low opacity is a good start; I've applied them primarily towards the joints such as the elbows and the knees, as well as a bit near her mouth for that earlier "got punched in the mouth or something" I mentioned. I really like adding black eyes just for the sake of showing that somebody's been hurt. When the purple's been applied very subtly, make a New Layer and use some type of sickly yellowish-green also on Multiply mode to get that dark bruising going.
4th Picture - Tearing: Your clothes need to take some battle damage if you're in a big fight. This can go down to bullet holes to even just holes and rips here and there. I painted over my original layer with some tears on her sleeves, skirt, and shirt collar, and for the most part I didn't add disheveled hair since I felt like she looked disheveled enough. (I tried adding strands in front of her face but it didn't look right so I scrapped it and left it at that.)
And there you have it, put all of that together/turn all your layers on and you should have something that looks metal as fuck. Michael Bay would be proud.
