Week 22 - Stylised (Butcher) Character Project Progress & Life Drawing

Unwrapping & Texturing

The main texture sheet for the butcher character's body. I made a mistake when unwrapping the face. The way I thought about doing it was to unwrap half of it, but that caused it to deform what made painting of it harder. I'll need to practice unwrapping of faces more in the future, as that would make my work easier here. Due to running out of time I have also not done enough work on my character's hands, they have only a few basic, painted details. They lack some more rendering and colour.



Above is a texture for my character's accessories, boots and belt etc. This texture was the easiest to make as I could stylise things here quite easily and that's what I did. Painting basic objects, like the surface for the knife handle was easy to me. The pouch for the knife was a problem though, I was aiming for a dark leather appearance for it, but it turned out looking a bit like a chocolate bar to me. I've shown it to some of my colleagues and they agreed. I clearly haven't used my reference well enough and will need to work on my digital painting of materials.


Above image shows the progress of my texture, applied on the 3D model. In the first step there are no smoothing groups and only the pouch is textures as a test. After that I applied smoothing groups to my model and some basic colours to seperate the different areas from eachother. Then I moved onto making the thick fabric trousers and some rendering of the facial details. My digital painting was still weak at the time and I found it hard to define some surfaces to represent the material I wanted. All I could do was to make some more research or at moodboard. That helped me slightly, but it was still my inexperience that has let me down. I hope to get better through this project so my digital painting skills will be better for the next one.

Now moving to the end of the texturing, all that was left was to add details to the head. I needed to paint in the darker areas around the eye sockets, then the ears and also the neck to help define its shape. I made a few rougher marks with my brush to give the skin a rougher surface, as it looked too smooth and I wanted my character to be more mature looking. Lastly I had the hair to paint, that included a short beard too.

Final Renders

I finished by making light maps and exported my character into Unreal Engine to render it.  I think he lighting wasn't adjusted correctly as my renders had this odd, dark shadow around the bottom of the aproon. I also somehow managed to make a visible seam following through the centre of the model and I couldn't find a way of removing it. It hasn't happened earlier when I was texturing and checking the model by using a symmetry modifier. It's when I finished it and properly collapsed the modifiers that I encountered this problem. Changing the smothing groups hasn't helped either, it looked as if my model was still plit into 2 seperate halves, but I checked for that and everything was attached.

If I went back to improve this character, I would start by painting more fabric folds onto the clothing, as I didn't know how to do it properly and only did a few. Apart from these problems, I think everything else looked fairly good in the model. Another area I would like to fix next time is the ears. I struggled to model them corectly to fit in my budget and eventually I didn't have anymore time to spend on making them so I left them as basic shapes. I would really like to go back to this project in the future and improve my model as much as possible as I really enjoyed it.

Life Drawing

23.2.15

In the last week of the project we approached more focused drawings. We focused on drawing seperate body parts and on this day we were drawing the model's hands and feet. Hands and feet were the toughest for me to make in my character model, so returning to these drawings partly helped me see how I could simplify and maybe stylise my hands so that I could save some triangles in my budget. I needed to figure out which areas to pay most attention to and which to leave simple as they were more flat than other. The outside of out wrist is a fairly flat area, so this is one of the places where I tried to limit my use of polygons/triangles.