Week Thirteen: Character Hand In

        My texturing is awful for this project, I’m always wondering about the balance between how much is too much with texturing. Just looking on google images at 3d models of assets, I can’t help but feel that there’s always too much going on something that’s not too important. But I tend to carry this view over to character models. We’re taught to remove intense shadows and light off the diffuse/ albedo and for me it makes me think if we have to get rid of all of it, so it pretty much becomes a flat shadow. Writing it out now, and understanding my thought process shows how wrong I am about tackling this element of texturing, and moving forward with it.

        The character’s face is very jagged as I still haven’t figured out a way to smooth the face out in the model, smoothing groups can slightly smooth the face out by manipulating the lighting, but this does not work when the angle changes between the geometry is too great for this trick to work.

         The clothing on the character appears extremely flat as well. I made a normal map in Z brush, but as I found out later on, sometimes the normal map does not export properly, coming out either too strong or too weak, for me it came out as the latter. The clothing also lacks any texture to it, as I was trying to do it in the style of Blizzard’s new game, Overwatch, by having simplistic texturing and instead using a range of maps to mirror the lighting effects of the fabric.

Simplistic texturing shown on the in game Tracer model from Overwatch.

Week Twelve: Presenting My Character

Even with the loss of my work, I managed to produce a presentation of my work using the work in process colour concepts of my second character. The presentation went really well, lots of positive reaction to the silhouette scribbles I did, and some really good criticism of my second character as well as the two chosen silhouettes.

EVAULATING MY FEEDBACK

      I received some really good comments about my chosen silhouettes. The smaller one looked like a ‘Kick-ass fairy’ and the other one looked like ‘lobster monster’ stated by one of my tutors. My concept purposely went against these silhouettes, as I thought it would have been obvious to go with what the silhouette had already prepared for me, but now when I think back to it, I literally had the perfect concepts in them and I decided to be clever, which I now see, really shouldn’t have done.

It was pointed out that my second character, In comparison to the silhouette, I lost the overall form. In trying to make it more anatomically correct in relation to a gorilla, the form which was its major drawing point was lost. I did mention that I struggle to understand how to stylise, as I feel you need a solid grasp on anatomy, the skeleton structure and the muscle structure, to create a functioning stylisation.

My first character had questions more relating to the modelling stage. In my concepts, she was a mesh skirt which is slightly transparent, which I was asked if that would be transparent on the model, which it is.

MOVING FORWARD

I only have a little bit to model before I can move onto texturing the Korean Goddess. I plan on texturing the goddess in the style of Overwatch, as the models are quite simply textured on the Albedo, yet most of the fabric detailing comes from the other maps applied to the model, such as Roughness maps and normal maps. As I’m not too good when it comes to texturing it makes sense to work simplistic at first to understand the basics.

Looking at Hanzo’s Trousers you can see where the specular map has been used to create this pattern along with a normal map. Overall it’s Diffuse/Albedo it quite simple, and most of the details are pulled from other maps. The same can be said below for Reaper, except the detailing is on his diffuse, and then the Specular map is used for the carbon fibre armour.