Wilderness Warrior: Touch ups and Texturing
This week started off with a lot of unwrapping which I got done fairly quickly, here is everything unwrapped and ready to be packed; also a checkerboard of the model:
After unwrapping everything it was onto packing the UV's, I found it easier to managed the textures if they were in separate texture sheets, so I divided the UV's up into groups:
I split up the 1024 allocated into 4 x 512's one being a 32bit texture; they are sectioned into: The head, Body, Armour and Props. I then packed these texture sheets ready for texturing:
I rendered all of the UV's to be a 2048 so that I can scale them down later and they will have better detail on them, than if I was painting straight onto a 512.
At about this time I set the scale of the model, to make sure that he was an accurate height I researched the height of otters, rescaled him and took the model into UE4 to test the height against the default player; This was a very minor thing to test but I feel like it would be beneficial to someone down the line, if they were putting the character into the game.
After that little test I got into texturing; I started by blocking out all of the colours for the model. I was at this time in the week that I got some crucial feedback from a tutor saying that my topology was too straight and that the loops didn't flow well. I took on board this feedback and started to implement everything he had suggested. Looking back on this I wish I had asked for some crit before going into unwrapping, however because I was already ahead of my timetable it wasn't going to mean I was behind; always set aside time for mistakes in a project. Here is the notes I took on the feedback I got:
After decided what needed to be fixed I went back through the model and fixed it up; this meant I had to re-unwrap parts of the model but I would prefer a to spend time doing this then going forward with a model that wasn't perfect. Here's the model after the fix ups:
The model flows a lot better now, after a dispute between tutors about tri-count I managed to cut the model down to 3983 less than what it was before. Due to this setting me back I decided to plan out the rest of the time I had on this project:
I was a bit concerned about the time I had left to texture but going through the week I am certain I will get it done in the time I have allocated. I want a high polish on all of my texturing so I have given myself 4 days to texture; there is also time I can work on texturing during the rigging stage because it won't take up 2 days.
Getting back into texturing I continued to paint the armour; I am very pleased with how the armour has come out; because I am not the strongest hand painter and doing this project was a challenge for me that I feel like I have already overcome. However this doesn't mean that everything went swimmingly, I found it hard to match the other textures styles to the wood that I painted; after analysing the wood I carried over the same painting technique to the other parts of the texture. This being a dark harsh edge with graphical highlights and shadows. Here is the armour set at the moment:
As you can see there is dark shadows on the texture this due to me baking ambient occlusion and applying them to the texture sheets for accurate shadow detail. Unfortunately the bake for the head didn't work because of the way that I unwrapped the model so I will have to hand paint the shadows in instead.
After finishing the armour I moved onto the head textures; I was at this point I started to get stressed and lost my way when trying to texture the fur. I tired multiple techniques but none of them seemed to look good or match the rest of the texturing; I tried realistic fur (which is the normal way I would texture this sort of thing) but it had massive seams and didn't match the rest of the texturing. I took this texture into substance painter to see if I could get rid of the seams but due to lack of knowledge and time to learn the program that idea was thrown out the window pretty quickly.
I also tried to make the fur by layering up stylised brush stokes; this worked a lot better but it looked messy and still didn't match 100%.
I took what I learnt from the layer brush technique and used a layered hand painted mask to make it look neater. It looks a lot better and it was getting closer to what I wanted. I then tested out a few things with this technique to see if I could improve it:
Here the layered effect has the realistic fur as a colour layer on top of it.
This one has the realistic fur as an overlay so you can see some of those brush strokes.
On this one I took the previous image's technique but added a stroke on the layers.
At this point I was unsure which way to go, I got some feedback from a tutor that helped me decide which way to go. I added a darker back and highlights to the bands of colour slowly fading into the darker back and a drop shadow under each band to give it more depth. Here is the final fur looking so much better than it did originally:
I'm glad that I spent the time to refine the fur because it means I am happy with it, it fits the rest of the texturing and I will be able to implement this same technique on the rest of the body. The tutor that helped me decide on a type of fur said to go for a more graphical approach, use gradients and thick shadows and highlights on everything to make it pop. He also suggested I look at the texturing in "Dota 2" and "Darksiders 2" due to them using this technique for their texturing.
I continued to texture and on the Friday got some more feedback from a different tutor saying I should add more little details to the texturing like worn parts, chunks missing on the armour and tears ect. He also suggested that I tweak the weapons so that they suit the character better; obviously I don't have a lot of time left to do this, however this doesn't mean I have ruled it out because I am having troubles texturing the club. It is looking too much like a mosaic. Here is where the texturing is at:
I will get the rest of the texturing done by Wednesday at the latest and rig him in the rest of the time I have. Overall I am very proud of my texturing on this project so far, it was a challenge doing this project due to me not being a character artist or someone that is a good painter and I feel like I have learnt a lot in the 2 weeks I have worked on this and I still have another week to keep on learning; I better keep on going!