Easter (not so) break - Texturing Cho

As you can see I've UV mapped Cho! I'll go through how as I talk about each individual item I textured :)


LEGS

Painting Cho’s legs was pretty good as far as stressful things go, although I had to get used to getting a brush I made in Photoshop to work well within mud box. I UV mapped the legs using a cylindrical map on each. I then took the mesh into mud box and painted on the base texture, using a brush I made. This brush wasn’t the one I had the problem with, it was the star brush. I used the projection tool in mud box to project the star brush I made in Photoshop to create her pattern. Initially I painted rather then projected the stars, and it looked terrible. Not only that, but the brush was making a dark shadow around the star, which was to do with where I made the brush and overlaid it on top of the already painted base texture. The projection didn’t give off as much of as shadow around the star, so I was able to touch the texture up in Photoshop with the replace colour tool. I went on to tweak the base texture in Photoshop by adding a filter that replicated a more material like quality on the tights.

WELLYS

To Texture the wellys I painted a block base colour on the UV map in Photoshop. I then took the boot into Mud Box and painted on the mud to give the boot more texture. It took a while to get both boots looking as though they were from the same pair because when painting on the mud, one of the boots would have a less amount of mud or a less smudged amount of mud etc. so it took a while to get them looking similar enough. I exported the layers from mud box and put them together in Photoshop, having done that I created the bump by inverting the colours and tweaking the levels to get a good bump on the boots in Photoshop.

JACKET


One of the apparent perks of using mud box was not having to be so particular with the UV mapping. However this was a big fat lie in hell and UV mapping still needed to be done accurately. So, I UV mapped the jacket using a cylindrical map, which worked out really nicely because I was able to get the seam to go along the zip of the jacket so it was discreet. I had a lot of trouble with the shoulders though. I took more tim e to carefully map around the shoulders so there was as little amount of stretch as possible when painting the texture. As the shoulders was a separate shell of UVs to the rest of the jacket, when I painted on the geometry in mud box there was a really obvious stretch in the texture where the seam was. I fixed this by over laying the UVs of the shoulders over the rest of Cho’s jacket; this might look a bit careless and messy when looking at the UV map, however it is what gave the cleanest result with the final texture. I painted the texture for the jacket in Photoshop using various filters to create a texture that looks like material…ish. Then I took photographs of a jacket and Photoshoped the material folds in as a different layer to add to the warn in texture of the jacket. I was able to paint a bump map for the jacket in mud box using a brush I made previously for the tights at a larger scale.

BELT

To paint the belt I UV mapped it by selecting all the faces and applying a cylindrical map to the mesh, I then had to tweak the verts accordingly so the texture wouldn’t stretch when I painted it in mud box. When I was taking photos for the jacket folds I took some photos for the jacket belt as well. I manipulated a photo in Photoshop to work as a brush in mud box for the belt. However, when I uploaded the obj file into mud box and began to paint the texture it want crazy and wouldn’t paint anything without a stretch. The same is applied to painting the bump layer; it was just destroying the belt. I thought my UV map might have been the problem so I re-UV mapped the belt using the same approach but I took more time when positioning the UVs. However, I still had the same problem, if not worse this time. so rather then paint the texture in mud box I did it in Photoshop which gave a more accurate texture but still slightly off, but there wasn’t much more I could do to improve the result having previously re UV mapped it a number of times, as well as taking into consideration the groups time schedule.

TOP/SLEVES

I UV mapped the arms with a cylindrical map and the chest with a planar map. I exported the mesh for both the arms and chest as an obj file into mud box so I could then paint the Diffuse, bump and specular layers which went without any hiccups.