Blog Five- Texturing the Gals
This week presented me with a healthy mix of challenge and fun, which was a much-needed change of pace in my workflow! I feel like it’s easy to be burnt out doing the same thing over and over, so I am very grateful to my group for giving me the opportunity to try my hand at something else for a little while!
With that in mind, I pivoted to experimenting with a base shader for the girls! This unfortunately required me to.. UV unwrap my models. Which was certainly tedious, but I really appreciated the experience of unwrapping a body, as I am sure I will have to do it again in my professional career. The body was done using cylindrical projections on both arms, legs, and torso, and the head was a circular projection that I heavily optimized and cleaned up. I UVd the eyes by themselves on a separate UV grid to really get the most detail I could into the eyes!
The eyes
Now that the stress-inducing UV layout process was done, I could finally open up SubstancePainter! I wanted the eyes to be almost over the top in their shininess and detail, so up close, the eyes looked very reminiscent of anime panels, and from afar, the eyes would gain a pretty gradient from all of the details meshing together.
To start the coloring, I made a quick gradient, then painted over that gradient with as much whimsy and sparkle as I could! I added an emission layer to the stars to really give the eyes that pop as well.
To add some extra stylization, I played with style layers to give some further cartoon vibes.
The body
Painting the body was actually a lot more straightforward than painting the eyes. I wanted this texture to be quite simple and smooth, so I relied a lot on making gradients and using ambient occlusion maps to generate smooth shadows. For highlights, I added some layers initially designed to add wear on paint, but I changed some things around so the wear simply looks like highlights on top og the skin.
To finish the texture, I did some manual painting on the lashes and smoothed out the skin shading.
