This character was a great way to try and get the best result I could painting 2D displacement maps (Photoshop). The frayed skin, flesh and protruding bones are all displaced from what is an actually very smooth model. There's one primary handpainted map, mixed with a couple of procedural maps to break up the symmetry. The finer details are just bump maps.
Since it's unclothed, the biggest challenge was painting accross UV seams (in Photoshop) and trying to minimalize the stretching. In the end, I just threw a lot of noisy detail at the problem to try and mask it, but some are still obvious to me. Someday, I'll finish the action short it appears in (maybe end 2006? there's so much to do - currently working on the goodguys).
This ghoul also appears in D'artiste Character Modelling, but I hadn't posted it before. I've included some details so that readers may better appreciate the comments left by Pascal Blanche (thanks pascal!), and may also leave comments of their own... so fire away!