Process

So since UV mapping is pretty much taking up my whole horizon at the moment I thought I'd do a little post regarding my work-flow:



First off here is a building with the basic texture applied and as you can see it uhhh...well it's stretched something awful.



So BAM! we select the front or side face and use a Planar Map. I had actually been selecting the front and back or the left and right etc, to save time however this causes some problems a little later on. So I planar mapped the faces individually.



Then I lay them all out and re-scale them till all the faces match up a little better. you can line it up and leave it like this I think but after having a word with Spence we add one more step.



Finally I sew the necessary edges back together to make a net type thing. Having trouble sewing the top and bottom faces for some reason but I'm working around it. The bottom faces are not important anyway since they are never seen.

Anyway this is probably the most basic way to do this but I'm pretty sure we get graded on showing our workflow or understanding of the process or something.

Tired now. Nap time.

Planning

So we met up with Dan Dalli (Henceforth known as Double D) today and he helped us get ourselves allocated. He mentioned that we should show evidence of personal planning so here is some planning.

1: Continue with test animations, no specicfic deadline for that.
2: Unwrap the hell out of the UVs for the environment masterfile, 2 weeks deadline. But I'm aiming to finish before that. hopefully in a week but it's nice to have that extra week buffer.

I'm tagging on a number 3 for myself as well. If all the UVs get sorted faster than expected then provided Sam can walk me through it I will jump on and help to finish up whatever texturing is left.

For the here and now though Ima concentrate on those UVs!

dynamic entry

Another animation update, This is only like half done. I want to have the guy slowly rise up from the crouching position and start to move away from the camera.

Just to show I'm working :P

Last UV update...I hope

Went back to the UVs again to tidy it up a little more. I've done all I can now really. There is some stretching mainly around the legs but that was the cost for lining up the seem on the inside of the leg which is pretty much invisible as I showed in a screenshot in an earlier post. With the exception of around the knee area where it gets nasty. However he has no detail there.

That's pretty much how it's worked out, I've managed to link up the seems pretty good where it matters and the areas that give the most problems don't have any vital detail on them, which is good. The only bit I'm worried about is the neck and shoulder areas because I couldn't match them up with the parallel shells but again these bits lack any definition that should carry over so It shouldn;t be too hard to work around.

It ain't perfect but it should work. And I feel like a learnt something new so I can do better next time.

Bah let's get drunk.

JC.

get crackin'

So yeah I've been attempting some `easy` shots. I decided to try some of the little bits that the Ninjas are gonna be doing at the end such as cracking the knuckles and neck, drawing swords etc.

Anyway heres an example of one I'm working on, crackin the knuckles. it kinda sucks but it's a start lol. Anyway I'll continue on with this malarky over the next few days.

Just so I can say I did

I just remembered a chat I had with Sam last night about keeping track of work, even if it doesn't get used in the final film so I figured I should just do a little post here to say what I tried to do with the hitman. You know...to show I was actually working :P

So yeah as I mentioned before I looked a lot at this film from the screenshot above, Pidgeon impossible since the dude is pretty basically textured here. He just looks more...production quality if that makes sense? I'm not sure how much of it is down to the lighting.

Anyway that's what I was going for but I don't know how to get it crisp like that. Here let it be known that I gave it my best though.

If I had kept all the other tests I did I would post them but some of them were pretty god awful and got angrily deleted :P

Stay Fresh.

JC.

UVs are BS

Better update over here. So I had put by the last part of the Ninja UVs to start texturing the Hitman/ target because we need them more. However I don't really know how to texture, I took the UVs for the Hitman into Photoshop and coloured him up a little and played with some blinns and fast skin textures on the reflective bits of the model.

After that though I was kind of lost. As far as I know Dan has told Spence to give that a go instead, which makes me feel kinda shitty but we are workin to a deadline so I understand.

Anyway I went back on the UVs to tidy up the calf and hands which as it turns out turned out to be a LOT more work than I thought lol. Still, above is a screenie of the calf I did just to test out the lining up of the calf UV's. I meant to show where the seem is but the fact it's hard to see means I did my job I guess.

Anyway it took me about 3 and a half hours to line up the seem on that one leg, and as a trade off the squares on the texture itself are not as even as they were, however I read around and apparently having the seems lined up is more important than having all those squares lined up. Unless your using photorealistic textures. Which we arn't so it should be alright.

I tested this just to show that it is workable even if not perfect so that there won't be any problems when applying a texture.

So I guess I'll work on this more tomorrow and later, and then I can get some test animations done for next monday. Tight schedule but workable.

Now I'm off to help my old man move a cement mixer.

Peace.

UVing take 2

Just checking in, I got side tracked from doing the UVs before since we had to change some things up. I had to go back on a few of the models and make some changes. That set me back a day.

Anyway been back on this for the last 2 days and it's going ok so far, by no means am I finished but I at least have an idea of what I'm doing now. I'm currently manually unfolding all the shells since I get some funky deformation when I auto unfold.

The way it stands, it's gonna take a while but It's gonna get done.

I dunno how Spence does it so fast. he's like a...a UV Ninja or something.

Anyway it's all good in the hood.

whoopsie

UV's be a messy business. As you can see. I started trying to sort out the UV's on the Hitman, however immedietly ran into a spot of trouble as the tutorial is for perfectly symetrical geometry, however, the Hitman's head is not that, due to the hair.

I worked around that, kind of. Anyway I made a start but it's proving to be a right git so I'm going to tangle with the Ninja first since he is a simpler mesh. Once I've done that I will have another pop at the Hitman since I'll hopefully have a feel for it after doing it once before.

Back to work

I was testing this base skin texture that Lewis is using on Pirates. He was kind enough to show me how it works but I never had a chance to try it properly with the dissertation going on. Since that's all done now I had a pop at it.

This one looks `ok` but this is with a simple colour an occlusion and a directional light. It's got some potential because you can play around with the specular and all kinds of funky shit.

I also just put a blinn on the shades for the sake of this render but I actually think they look pretty good with just the blinn.

I will probably play around with the settings of it a bit later and see if I can get it looking tasty, but this may be the simplest way of getting a skin on these dudes.