Texturing

When it came to texturing within Photoshop, I stumbled across alot of problems.

After getting the initial texture down, I found that the UVW map wasn't quite right and left me with unpainted areas around the mouth.



At first I thought I could go back into 3DS and simply move the mouth around...and this lead to disaster.



As you can see it turnt my character into a bit of a scarecrow where the texture had tiled itself. I am unsure how to get round this, but luckily id made a previous save so could go back.

It is probably good that I did have to go back as I managed to solve the initial problem. I found that the reason for part of the mouth not being textured was that I had missed a small spot within Photoshop.

I then had a similar problem occur around the front of the neck, again where I had missed a spot on the material.



If you notice ont he head is the dark area under the chin, this is not shading, it is infact poor alignment of my material within photoshop. Here I found how important it is to be accurate with the painting of the face, something that may seem a large area of the face, may only be a small area upon the UVW Map.



My next failure with the texturing and modelling was the ear. During the tutorial it states how important it is to make the ear as flat as possible when using the Pelt tool. I started to realise why after texturing the ear.



The texture of the ear appears quite square, I am unsure whether this is due to the poor modelling of the ear, or whether the texture is struggling to wrap itself around the detailed object. Sadly due to running out of time I cannot look into this further but at somepoint it would be beneficial to me to understand why this has happend.

So at present this is the state of my face...

Welding the Symmetry line & exporting the UVW Map

With a symmetry modifier already on the face, the initial UVW map is set below the symmetry modifier. The next process is to add an Unwrap UVW modifier above the Symmetry and weld the two sides of the face.

The reason for adding the second Unwrap UVW is to allow me to select the right side of the face.
after selecting the right ear and right side of the face, I had to flip the sections so that it produced a map of the full face. By wedlding the central points together I was left with the following UVW Map.



This then gave me a basis in which to apply a texture within photoshop.

UVW Unwrap of the ear

This task required me to follow a similar basis to what I did with the UVW Unwrap on the head.

I found that I had very little to edit in terms of the inverted faces or the overlapping faces, most of the overlapping faces were caused by the outer edge of the ear.

The only difference of the Unwrap on the ear was that I had to use the "Pelt" tool. The purpose of the "Pelt" tool is too take an over complicated surface and flatten it out as much as possible which makes it easier when applying the texture.
(Before and after shots of the ear below.)

From looking at the two screenshots the main difference is how complicated the ear is in the initial one.



It displays far more quads, even though this may improve quality, it will cause alot more problems with rendering times due to the amount of pixels it will take up. The second picture shows the simple form that the ear has after using the "Pelt" tool with Unwrap UVW.

UVW Map

Now then, I'd already had one shot at using the Unwrap UVW modifier before but realised i'd forgotten to produce lips and attach the ears meant I had to stop. To be honest im glad, if you take at view at one of my earlier entries the texturing was a shocker, I had patches of the face where they shouldn't have been and it was too easily distinguishable between the areas.



So the first stage of producing the texture is to layout the coordinates for each area of the face within 3DS.

By adding a chequered material you are able to see what areas of the head are stretched. This is not a good thing as it means the quality of the texture on that area of the head will lack quality.

I moved the vertices within the Unwrap modifier as much as possible until the areas were less stretched (see below for before and after shots)



I decided to go with attempt two as the stretched areas were more around the back of the head and I hoped that with the hair being there it wouldn't cause much problem in loss of detail.



The squares around the face were relatively even so I decided to move onto the next stage to remove any inverted or overlapped faces.



The inverted faces were fairly easy to fix. The majority of the time it was where multiple quads were flowing into each other so it meant just defining each quad more clearly by moving the vertices.
Other times it could be where a quad wasn't really clear and appeared more like a triangle or a really odd shape.

The only inverted face I did not managed to correct was the nose. I believe this is due to the poor standard of modelling when producing the nose. I am unsure how much this will effect the texture map result.



After deciding to leave the inverted nose as it was I moved on to edit the overlapped faces of the UVW Map. I found this a simple task to complete, with only two overlapped faces to deal with.

Lips and attaching the ear

Since getting used to the UVW mapping, I have gone back over the modelling and produced lips as well as attached the ears to the head.

To produce the lips I decided to extrude edges from around the space where the mouth should be. Using the same technique used for the head, I based the vertices for depth and width using the reference plates.



A problem that I had when setting up the lips was knowing how many quads to have. When smoothing the lips I found that the top lip appeared considerably thinner than the bottom lip. I found this was due to not extruding the edges far enough.



Attaching the ear:

The next stage was to attach the ear, from the initial modelling of the ear I was extremely pleased with the amount of detail that I managed to get.

But I soon stumbled across problems when trying to attach it to the head.

The initial problem was finding what vertices on the ear should be attached to the head. The main reason for this was I was getting confused what were vertices of the ear, and what were the head as it just looked like a giant mess.



The next problem I came to was the vertices that seemed the most obvious to weld to the head, were not welding. When using target weld you usually select what one you'd like to move, and what vertex to move it to. Some of the vertices that I was selecting welded fine, but every so often I'd find a vertex that just wouldn't weld.




This lead to me having to adjust the modelling of the ear. To do this I had to delete vertices and then redraw quads. During this process I managed to make a mistake which lead to a loss in modelling quality of the ear.



I believe this happend due to deleting incorrect vertices. If time wasn't an issue then I would go back over the ear and reattach it with the level of detail that I had before. I believe that this version (above) is still acceptable for the purpose of the project. With this now complete I will now move on to producing the texture of the character using UVW mapping and Photoshop.

Giving the character some face!

Before I go on to produce some lips for my character, I have decided to give the UVW mapping a quick try.

At the start of the project i was thinking..."How hard can texturing the face be, its just a bit of Photoshop". Truthfully, I thought that all I'd have to do is cut out the face from the original topology and throw it in the materials editor within 3DS...How I was wrong!

I first had to produce a flat version of the head on which to paint onto. This was done using the "Unwrap UVW" editer.

Here it is possible to see what parts of the face aren't connected properly. I found that the vertices around the centre of the forehead were slightly out of place and had left a triangle.

Once I had managed to edit this out I had to export the map into Photoshop.

This is where the fun began. I would have to cut out parts of the topology and resize them to fit the UVW map. This process took up alot more time than I was expecting.

But for a first attempt I thought I did a good job...



All the vital parts of the face are in the right area. I haven't gone into much detail for this area as I will have to redo it for when I finish adding the lips and ears. But now I know what to expect when it comes to the real thing.

Ear

I have now finished connecting up the remainder of the characters neck (after I had somehow managed not to notice!!!)

Its now time to create the ear and finally the lips.

In all honesty I got lost during the tutorial of producing the ear. The problem I found is that I started concentrating too much on what the ear in the tutorial is meant to look like, instead of using the technique and producing my own ear.

After watching the tutorial around 3 times, I decided to turn it off thinking I was familiarised with the entire process.

With some helpful tips from my group member Robert, I found that the ear wasn't so daunting after all and managed to produce this...



I found that the best way to produce the ear was to start off with the basic outline. (Using the line tool in corner mode)

I then used the extrude modifier to produce a block. This would allow me to use the cut tool (within edges mode of editable poly) to produce vertices that I could adjust.

By using the edges mode it allowed me to layout the shape of the ear and add vertices when the depth of the ear changed.


Now that I have created the ear I have decided to use target weld to attach the ear to the head. But now I have a problem with this process.

I haven't set out the area on the head where the ears would need to be connected. (Vertices are out of place and would lead to stretching if I connected the two parts in their current state).

I plan to create the lips and work on the structure of attaching the ear and head components after. Allowing me to be fully focussed on the task ahead.