I finished adjusting my maps in Substance Painter and fixed the color and roughness of the inner mouth and tongue.
Additionally, to add a little flair to my chameleon, I decided to have the color change slightly throughout the animation. I did this by reading my painted base color map into an aiColorCorrect node. I then keyed the "Hue Shift" to have the colors change throughout the animation. I've decided to have him go through three stages (shown below). He starts off more yellow-orange, then transforms into its original yellow-green color and then lastly it becomes a really rich green color.
![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/4e5b1e_14edf8117ec14979a8b4e2d08afc6390~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_147,h_71,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/4e5b1e_14edf8117ec14979a8b4e2d08afc6390~mv2.jpg)
With all these aspects set up, I set up my render layers so that I could set up my node network in Nuke. I originally only had one ground occlusion and one object occlusion layer, but after my first composite, I realized that the shadow didn't seem dark enough, so I created a second ground occlusion layer to give a core to my contact shadow and create depth and believability.
![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/4e5b1e_05161e8f3d9f47b3a31813f73954cf05~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_147,h_68,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/4e5b1e_05161e8f3d9f47b3a31813f73954cf05~mv2.jpg)
![](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/4e5b1e_831e10946cd540ef91f29752aa4397ab~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_147,h_83,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/4e5b1e_831e10946cd540ef91f29752aa4397ab~mv2.jpg)
Now that I've composited everything together, it's time to optimize my render settings and begin rendering my animation for the final composite.