Week 37: The Texture

The Texture:

                               

Deciding the colour of the pattern. I originally made them orange to begin with.
It was felt that a deeper colour, more or a red may look better.

It took a while to decide; running through every colour of the rainbow, but eventually, we settled on red for the time being.


It seems that, in the scene, some of the colours and details are washed out under the maya lights. This is something we will have to look at as we go.

 The next step is to take the character into a lit scene to see how it holds up. It's likely that the character will still undergo some changes once it's lit and in the environment. Nevertheless, the hard bit's done. Nearly there now.

Week 36: Texturing Design Ideas

 As the guys and I discussed the creature's texture, we thought it was would be good to give him a pattern (as discussed last semester) to emphasise his fictional/magical nature.


Throughout the process of creating the texture, I whipped up a few designs in mudbox to mull over with the guys:

We additionally discussed stripes, so I decided to try this out firstly. Neither of our hearts rested on this design, however.

In this, I was looking at simplicity in the design. I wanted tit to be striking but not so much as to take away from the character's design. The symbol on the back appealed to me and I felt something similar to this could be a possible winner.


In the early character designs, we looked at a more complicated design on the character.

In this case, I feel the use of more softer colours will be necessary. I did try to maintain a touch of the minimal approach as I had in the previous example. However, this design naturally required a little more detail. The team and I felt that the simpler the design the better.









With this one I was going for something a little different from the others. A little more futuristic, still simple, but somewhat more suggestive of another world. We did however, still feel that the triangle design, in its simple but edgy style made more of a statement, without taking too much from the character. So this is the route I decided to go down for the final design.








For the final design, I stuck with simple, but tried softer, more organic shapes. It was unanimously agreed this was the design to take on to the next stage.

Week 36: More Texturing

Further progress:

After getting the skin/fur somewhat sorted, it was just a case of editing final details.

Week 35: Texturing Continues...

Texturing progress:

Throughout the process I found myself moving between Mudbox and Photoshop to alter the layers as necessary.

Building up layers to create subtleties of the skin/fur.

Creating the base for a more suggestive change in texture and colour of the skin/fur to add more depth.

Week 34: Character Texturing begins....

I began to texture the character today. I began by discussing with the guys what we were going for and taking the character into mudbox to try out some things.

We discussed his skin colour being blue (but that this will be easily changeable if necessary). 

We mentioned breaking up his skin tone with whites and paler colours almost as a ramp/gradient to make his appearance a little more interesting. 

Week 32: Semester 2 Presentation

The presentation, I believe, went much better this time round. I felt much more confident throughout and I felt that helped me in my delivery.

Basically I did a sum up of my progress throughout the semester.

I mentioned primarily the Going Live and the Mastronauts project.

For Going Live I focussed primarily on Texturing and Rendering.




Concept art I'd created for 'Concerning Dragons'.

Texturing/Concept tests for 'Concerning Dragons'.

Lighting tests using IBLs for 'Concerning Dragons'.

Rendering for 'Concerning Dragons'.



Throughout the Mastronauts Project, I will be honing in on the Lighting, rendering and compositing processes and I felt my roles in Going Live have really helped me to prepare for this. In the presentation I also described how Going Live has assisted me throughout this test:

Comping the character into the scene

Node Tree in Nuke

IBL for lighting the test

Week 26: Going Live - A few more mountain textures

    Does whatever a Tiger Mountain does...


                                                            First test - horizontal lines.

                                     
                                         
                                                 Second test - vertical lines. There are more
                                                 lines in this test. I'm unsure if this is too much
                                                 or not.

        

        

I may try another vertical line test, more in the style of the first test with less lines. I also feel that perhaps more tests involving simpler and straighter lines may provide a bit more variety. If it calls for it, this is something I will look into further.

Week 21: Going Live - Forever Texturing

Ok so, I've been meaning to post this up for a while. Rebecca and I have been messing around with projection in mudbox and maya.

                                  

This first piece is more of a  concept. The texture was projected on in maya (if I remember correctly). But there was so little control over where the texture sat. There's just a backdrop and light thrown in there too, to help create more depth.

                                                                     UV map

                                                     Texture created in Mudbox & PS

Elements put together in Maya

This is just like the test Rebecca previously posted, checking the projected texture against the map (obviously it's not in the right place, but you get the point).

The method that seemed to be easiest was to apply the paper colour/texture of the map as an actual shader and then to project the lines on top, placing them where we wanted them and just updating the changes from the projected stencils in mudbox to the existing shader. Once the lines were on the 3D model, they seemed to be less sketch-like. I think we'll need to tweak the stencil a bit. It's not perfect, but it is getting there.

Week 13: Polygons

Polygon shoe finished textures:

                                      

Next up: Lighting, Rendering & Compositing.