So doing the volcano from The Ultimate Blender 3D Nodes Course gave me an idea what if I apply this to a rock monster. Not the best looking golem but it was fun adding the lava material and making these patterns.
For the lava mask, I used a different approach since UV unwrapping may not be optimal in this highly dense sculpt. Also, I wanted to try to see if it’s possible to create a mask without doing retopology and UV unwrapping. Instead of UV unwrapping and drawing in the image texture, I used vertex paint to create the mask for the lava.
However, I found some limitations using this method for masking. Applying remesh or using dyntopo will delete all the vertex paint so making changes in the sculpt would mean redrawing the mask.
The nodes I used for the lava mask to add some distortion so it doesn’t look too smooth. Although it doesn’t look as distorted like the lava mask from the Node Course but it gets the job done. The textures for the rock and lava are the same from the course
You could also use a voronoi texture set to distance to edge to make the lava lines, that’s what I did for the lava monster that is in the course intro. Either way great job!