31/08/15 - UVing the character.

Spent the entire day today learning how to take my character apart and UV all his appropriate parts with the appropriate textures.  Still really grateful for the script, which cut down on a lot of time I would have spent organizing and stitching things together.  Because of it, I managed to get my UVs done for the character's body and had him more or less complete by the end of the day!

Coloring the parts was perhaps the most time consuming and frustrating part of this exercise.  I spent a lot of time jumping in between Maya and Photoshop, painstakingly altering and updating the image files so that things would line up correctly on my character model.  This was particularly difficult with the marks on his shoulder, his belt, and the hollow heart shape in the middle of his chest.  Once smoothed, the edges of things shifted, so I found myself having to do a small line of color in certain places so that the edges would still look accurate even in a smoother mode.

I ended up reverting to cutting the character in half so that I could simply mirror his texture once the model was complete.

I experimented with a few things as well, such as how to divide the character's hair and whether I wanted variation in his locs.  Here are a couple of maps with tests on them - both of them are for one of the dreadlocks on his head:

I opted out of this idea in the end though, sticking to a single solid color under the texture instead, as messing with it made his hair much darker than I wanted it to be.

I've never worked on something for what was more or less a solid 6 hours though!  It made me realize the importance of taking breaks and actually finding the time to have lunch.  Nonetheless, my character model is complete!

I had a little bit of time to work on refining his textures, as quite a few of them had large seams from me sticking strictly to the UV guidelines.  Adding little bits to the borders fixed this up though, and as a result I think my final character looks very solid.  His face still creeps me out a little but overall I think it was very successful for my first character model!

Keat suggested I tweak his eyes a little bit though as my textures didn't look as good as they could have.  Here's some screenshots of me trying to adjust them:

I plan to finish him up and get a turntable done tomorrow!  So stay tuned for the final turnaround file.