FMP - Week 8

 

Texturing time!

 

I started off this week by going into Marmoset and baking the high poly mesh of Justice to the low poly. I had a bit of trouble in Marmoset because the high poly kept crashing the software and I wasn’t sure what was wrong. I tried decimating it, changing the file type, etc but it kept crashing. My only work around was doing individual bakes for each portion of the model and then merging the image files in Photoshop. It wasn’t ideal but I genuinely couldn’t wrap my head around why Marmoset was crashing, it had never happened prior to this. Nonetheless, I got the bake done.

 

In Photoshop, I laid down the base colours for the model in accordance to my concept and overlayed the AO bake on top to get the base shadows. I then imported the model and this base texture into 3DCoat to give it a bit of a basic wash of lighting and painting in landmark details. This beginning stage was a bit of back and forth between Photoshop and 3DCoat to get colours and values right to give me a good direction for rendering going forward. I wasn’t particularly clean with anything at this point but I did do some starter rendering on the torso to envision the level of detail I was striving for. I also knew I would be spending the most time rendering the skin as it was the most on show in comparison to everything else so I may as well get a head start.

 

But with everything blocked out enough, I had all the information I needed to just start rendering. It was a familiar process now that I’d completed the High Priestess so it was mainly a case of just buckling down and getting it done. I think in some areas I’d found better techniques when it’d come to rendering and I was striving to push the contrast a bit more in areas so it may be a case of going back to the High Priestess and refining her more so that there’s more unity between the two characters. I mean it’s not drastically different but enough to make me think I could add some more to her.

 

I was a bit all over the place in terms of order of painting with Justice. Typically for any model I would start texturing the head first and then work my way down. But Justice has no face nor hair so I basically textured according to colour. I handled all the green areas, then the gold, then the red, etc. Additionally in terms of the red, I was a bit sceptical when adding the red to the bandages. I was worried that it would be too much and would make the model look too garish overall. I spent quite a lot of time pushing and pulling the hues around with it to make it stand out but not stand off-ish, if that makes sense. I think it’s worked out in the end though I did have to go quite dark at some points with it. I also changed the underskirt design a bit from the original concept, to make it more presentable as opposed to rugged. I felt the rugged look was too out of place in that area surrounded by the gold, changing it to a material similar to the veil I felt fit better and wouldn’t detract from Justice’s overall rather well put disposition.

 

There are still some tweaks to be made in terms of colour to get to match the High Priestess better but I’m happy with how he’s turned out so far!