Texturing Project

I had no idea what project we were going to be given after the gladiator project and with only two weeks till assessment I knew it couldn't be anything massive.

So we were set the texturing competition project. We were given two basic character meshes, a male and a female and had the task of unwrapping, texturing and rigging both within the two week deadline. I figured a good way to approach this would be to do one a week so I'd have plenty of time one each.





I started by having a good look at each of the models and thinking about what they reminded me of, what style I could give them and how I should texture or portray them. The ideas that I visualised were of a stylised army look, so I started researching this and finding reference images.

Male moodboard

Female moodboard

 To bring my ideas together I did some quick paint overs of the models to help me decide how I was going to texture each one.

I felt I had a stronger idea of what I wanted to do for the female model, so I unwrapped this one first. I found unwrapping the model to be fairly straight forward and quick without too many difficulties. Knowing the texture sheet was limited to 512x512 I made an effort to use as much of the texture space as possible so it would have the highest quality possible. I made the texture using a mix of reference images and hand painted textures, I think this mix worked well and generated an interesting texture.

Quick female concepts.

 Using the 'skin' modifier to rig the character was quick and simple, I found the envelopes it made as default were effective and fairly accurate enough. I did however have to alter the weights of a few verts so it animated slightly more realisticly.

Female model

With the style of the textures now set with the completed female model doing the male was straight forward. I found unwrapping him slightly more irritating than the female due to more complicated geometry but I was able to create a UV that I thought would texture well, using as much of the space as possible. Following the same method as before I used a mix of hand painted textures and reference images to create a texture I was happy with.

While the doing the rest of the model was was problem free when I got to rigging the male model everything started to go wrong. 3Ds max crashed halfway through rigging and this corrupted my autoback files, the only save I had was before I started rigging.

Male model

This was only the beginning of the problems however and from this point on Max would crash regularly meaning I had to redo most of the rigging several times. I also had alot of problems getting the texture to display with a model that wold keep going grey and not displaying the textures.

As a result of these problems I'm not completely satisfied with the male model's rigging and the way he animates, the majority of the model is OK but there are some bits I would change if the program didn't crash the instant I tried to.

Despite some problems I enjoyed the texturing project, I'm pleased with the textures I made and the overall theme and look of the models together.

Finished posed models.