FMP - Week 3

 A rather non-exciting week for my FMP- I mainly handled retopology and unwrapping so there’s nothing too interesting to talk about.

 

I’d pre-emptively made some portions of my model low-poly so the retopology stage mainly concerned the head, torso and hair. I also wasn’t too stilted on making sure everything was extremely low poly so I allowed myself to be generous with tris in areas. I was quite careful with retopologizing though to keep in mind what kind of rig I wanted to give the final model so I could add or remove geometry accordingly.

 

I did all my retopology in 3DCoat and then imported the pieces into 3DS Max where I just made sure everything was aligned correctly since I would be baking an AO map and also some opacity. Unwrapping was a straightforward process, but considering the skirt and veil were going to have an alpha channel I had to separate them onto a different map from the remainder of the model.

 

The unwraps I ended up having were:

> One 1024 x 1024 for the weapon + scroll

> One 1024 x 1024 for the skirt + veil

> One 1024 x 2048 for the main body

 

I chose to have the main body UVs as a 1024 x 2048 for the sake of having a better, uniform texel density. Since I’m doing this in a hand painted style (meaning diffuse only) I want the painting to be evenly detailed without looking pixelated in certain areas. There are lots of small parts to the High Priestess what with her jewellery and chains, so I felt have a 1:2 ratio map would end up working better than making everything fit on a 1:1 map. Also all the textures equate to a 2K resolution. I’ll most likely paint the textures at a 4K resolution though for quality and then scale it down.

 

This week however, I was ahead of schedule. On my gantt chart I’d planned to have the retopo and unwraps done by the end of the week but I’d ended up having them done by the middle of the week (roughly) so I went ahead and did the AO baking and then laid down some flat colours.

 

I did my baking in Marmoset which was very simple, no problems with that, and then I took the textures into Photoshop where I arranged things accordingly and picked out my base colours. I did this only for the main model for now, the weapon and scroll I’ll come back to.

 

I’d looked into hand painting methods long before starting my FMP but I refer back to Yekaterina Bourkina’s tutorial and Tommy Gunardi Teguh’s breakdown process a lot when thinking of how to start the texturing process. I laid down the flat colours, overlayed the AO bake as a multiply layer and then did some colour correction with gradient maps to give me a solid base to start with. I brought this base texture into 3DCoat where I’ll be doing all my texture work and saw how the colours were working. I think I’ll probably colour correct it as I go along which is fine but as a starting point I think this is good enough.