week 21

Week 21

This week for the character project I would say has been one of my most crackdown weeks so far. Looking back, I am quite proud of what I had managed to accomplish as I managed to model the clothing on top of my character early on in the week. In addition to this I was able to unwrap my character and texture him within the weekend,  thus giving me a nice week to get my head around rigging my character; something that still gives me the shivers.

On the other hand, all of this hard work came at a cost to my health as I managed to burn myself out at the end of the intensive texturing weekend.

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The model you see above is a screen cap of my model without its textures.  I managed to get this modelled in the first half of the week by extruding and cutting verts on my models mesh. Problem was, by doing this I created so many Ngons by the end of the modelling stage I spent a good half a day cleaning up the topology of my mesh. 

My Unwrap

When I did get to the eventual unwrap phase of my model, this admittedly felt like a breeze. (Tell that to my past self and he would disagree.) Anyway after unwrapping so many boxes, cylindrical and spherical forms. This unwrap process felt quite natural as I just applied basic knowledge of what I have learnt so far and adjusted it to the model as well as keeping in mind of hiding seams. I even attempted to experiment with 3d coat a tool which specialises in unwrapping. However I felt as weird as this sounds that I wanted to train myself more with 3ds maxes unwrapp tools as say if I am too reliant on 3d coat If I were to work at a company which doesn't own the software for lack of a better term I would be "buggered" .

James Gurney's theory

The last of the week I spent texturing intensively, starting on Friday evening and finishing on Sunday evening. Texturing this character felt more like problem solving than just flat out painting. One problem I had to get to grips with was using James Gurney's colour zone theory and having to apply it to someone of my decent and skin tone.

Colour zone texture for character

When attempting to use this on my model I found that I had to adjust the model so much changing the layer style to hue and turning down the saturation and opacity of the layer. It almost got me a bit down because when I did feel as If it wasn't working so much with my skin tone I attempted to find some alternative colour zones for different races and it seems there are no theories out there. This meant if and when I do want to paint other races I will need to really observe the colours within their portraits rather than relying on valuable information.

My texture

Another problem I came across was attempting to convey the look of plaid on my characters texture to convey his Scottish background. I spend hours on this constantly re iterating my texture to make sure it clearly communicates said look.

It eventually got to the point in which I watched a DIY painting video on creating a tartan pattern for a bedroom. Little did I know that this would be the process that I eventually adapted for my production of my tartan texture.

As you can see above is the model fully unwrapped and textured. Its been a long week but bring on the next one. On to rigging see you next week.