Texturing the character

With the Unwrap complete it was now time to start texturing the character this part of the process i really enjoy as to me it is at this point that things really start to seem to come to life. I started off with a base colour for the body and slowly built up the texture also checking back what it looked like on the model. Here's is two images to show the base metal texture and then some more finer detail added:

Base texture Concept texture

Again for the head texture i quickly put together a texture just to get something down:

This texture is by no means complete i just wanted to get a general texture down and apply it to my model to get a feel for it. Below is the above textures applied to my model:

Front view Side view

Although these textures are not fully complete it gave me a good idea on how the character is looking and with some basic textures laid down i thought i should move on to skinning the character in order for me to be able to import into the Unreal Editor.

I would like to also say at this point that during my texturing i have found a couple of websites that provide good quailty textures available to download for free.

Here are the URL's for the sites:

http://www.cgtextures.com/

http://mayang.com/textures/

http://www.imageafter.com/textures.php

Unwrapping the character

Firstly i just want to apologise for not updating my blog recently i have got so caught up in developing my character i haven't had time to post anything i also had a major issue which i will get onto later on another post.

I have to say that Unwrapping isn't my favourite part of the process (I don't think many people do) but having said that i did learn some more things i never knew you could do within 3DS Max. As my character is to be built for Unreal Tournament 3 my UV Layouts had to be set out in a particular way. Below the images show how i should set out my UV's according to Unreal.

Head UV Layout

Body UV Layout

Looking at the layout of the head i immediately noticed how much wasted space area there was as i have always been told to use up as much space as possible as this unused spaces is loss of memory. So why unreal set out the UV's in this way i don't really know the answer to, John or Dean might be able to answer that one for me. Any ideas guys?

So following these rules i produced the following UV Layouts:

Head UV Layout

Body UV Layout

The Unwrapping took alot of hours to do and i had particular trouble around the jet pack area as is such the amount of detail around this area. During this time and experimenting with my Unwrapping i got to know a thing called Pelt Mapping i had now prior knowledge of this. I only found out about it whilst searching on youtube watching some tutorials on it the Pelt Mapping can be found under Map Parameters within 3DS Max. Although this was a handy little tool i never eventually used it as i was 100% confident that i could use it to its full potential, so i ended up unwrapping all the UV's manually. Another thing i never knew about was once a UVW Unwrap has been added to the stack and unwrapping had begun. It was possible to collapse the stack back down the an editable poly and make adjustments to the mesh. Once another UVW Unwrap was added to the stack the previous Unwrap was still present. This was extremely useful as i found whilst unwrapping that i encountered some 5 sided polys and this helped me eradicate any 5 sided polys from my model.

After a couple of weeks work i was finally happy here is how the Unwrap looked on my model with a checker applied from the Material Editor. I tried to keep all the checkers to equal size as much as possible in order to keep the resolution at equal length. Below is some screen grabs to illustrate this:

I'm very pleased how the unwrapping has gone and i have to say its the best unwrap that i have ever done. Having said this its only my second time of unwrapping a character here is the first character i created on the Foundation Degree 2 years ago:

As you can see from my previous attempt of building a character i feel i have greatly improved my skills in this area i understand the process alot more and how to go achieving good results when unwrapping. This will not just include unwrapping a character but also for any other object that i will build in the future.

Whilst i am here doing a crit of my previous work i might as well point out a few things i noticed when looking at my last attempt of a character. The first thing i would like to point out is the actual layout of the UV's if we look below there is alot of unused space in the layout this is also bad as this is wasted memory:

Also i would like to point out how many polys/tris that where used on my last character the following two screen grabs show just how many unnecessary tris was used and therefore this character just simply wouldn't work if attempted to be used in something like Unreal etc.

Looking at other artists work

I know that i have put up work by other artists up before but i have never really commented on them and i thought that this would be a good time to show some work again and attempt to show how they have helped me in developing my character and making him more unique. Some images you may have seen before i earlier posts and some new ones will be displayed as well. Alot of these images can be found at http://www.zbrushcentral.com/featured2col.php or at http://www.dominancewar.com/

fig.10 fig.11 fig.12 fig.13 fig.14 fig.15

Looking at the Silhoutte

I would just like to talk about my characters silhouette and how it has changed since Pre-Production. In Pre-Production and designing my concepts i couldn't see that my character had no real shape or form. Something that made my character instantly recognizable from a dist ants everything was very flat & dull. If we look at fig.9 this will illustrate how it has changed quite dramatically in places.

fig.9

Hopefully fig.9 shows the comparison between Pre-Production and the Production stage. I think most notably there has been a significant change from the side view. Adding the Jetpack to the character has helped enormously and also extruding the shoulders has helped the character be more defined, more shape was added to the arms and leg areas in order to make the silhouette stand out more. As my characters shape had to change to conform with the UT3 skeleton this became alot more clearer to me. If i could go back to the Pre-Production stage again now i would definitely take this into account and this would be at the forefront of my mind in future projects. I would even say that i could of taken this a step further in creating a better shape and silhouette but as time is ticking i will have to leave it as it is unfortunately. I now know that having a good silhouette is very important when designing a character as this helps people to instantly identify the character immediately.

Rough Mini Gun build

I decided over the last couple of days to have a go at fleshing out a rough Mini gun just in case i had time to completely finish it off for handin. Using alot of reference material i created this pics below:



I wasn't happy with this first attempt things were not working right i also had to consider the functionality of the weapon and with this in mind i went back and produced this:

A new addition to the family???

Having blocked out the Assault rifle and having another meeting with John we both came to the agreement that since my character is heavily built that it might be a good idea to give him a bigger weapon to hold as well as the Assault Rifle. In our meeting we discussed how in Team Fortress 2 there is a character called "The Heavy" this character is also bulky in size and posses a Minigun. With this in mind i decided that along side the Assault Rifle that i would produce a Mini gun also.

Here is a picture of "The Heavy" from Team fortress 2:

I then gathered lots of reference images from http://www.google.co.uk/ to give me a much better understanding on how to construct a Minigun here is just a sample of those images i had collected.

It was agreed that i would stick to the original plan of creating the Assault Rifle first and only if i had time would i carry on this idea of producing a Mini gun for the character as well.

Now its time for the Weapon

With my character well under way and blocked out i thought it was about time to start modelling the Assault rifle that i had produced concept designs for back in Pre-Production. For now i didn't want to concentrate on detail as much but getting something down rough and blocked out would be a good start.

Here is what i produced: