Gladiator UVs and Textures - 3D Game Production Week 19

 

This week I unwrapped my model and got most of the texturing done. After an unsucessful attempt, I unwrapped the upper torso as one UV map. In particular it was difficult to unwrap the belt separately from the skin. I managed to do it and proceeded with the rest of the body.

For the face I unwrapped it with the usual technique, by inserting seams on the back of the head and continuing it to the sides as seen below. This UV  unwrap allowed me to paint everything the way I wanted to do and I made sure to give the face as much geometry as possible.

The lower body and the armor pieces share the second texture map, and I took particular care while optimizing this map as there are multiple objects in one place.

I used the checker pattern in order to scale the individual elements. I wanted to make sure that most of the body is the same texture density so this was the obvious method to check it.

I further unwrapped individual parts of the armor and added them to the UV map.

For my texturing, I started in Blender, as it offers the workflow of both 2D and 3D at the same time. In my painting I followed a very simple method of painting from start to finish. I first drew the main muscle shapes and then did smoothing whereever necessary. I attempted to follow a WoW Classic era of texturing in terms of colors and general ideas, although far less stylized.

In my painting, I focused on changing color hues in the skin instead of having only value doing the work. The top of the head I made more yellow, redder for the cheeks, and a cooler shade on the jaw.

I also used 3D Coat for my texture painting as it has better brushes and makes hand painted texturing more fun. Using multiple softwares at the same time was a good experience as I learned a lot of things about importing and exporting project files.

I painted the other texture map as well. I painted in the main muscle shapes, added some implied lighting and only then further smoothened things out. By using the combination of 2D and 3D at the same time I was able to at the same time paint the shield and the helmet as well as organic forms.

For my shield, I did separate research and combined two different designs from historical Roman shields to create this design. I copied the wing four times over in order to be more efficient and not have to paint the same thing four times over.