Texturing

Over the past few weeks I've been helping anywhere I can with whatever I can. Animation hasn't started yet because of huge problems with the apprentice and hunter rigs, mostly with their weight painting and lack of facial controls so while that gets fixed I've been making my way through a pile of textures and after finishing them, there's now a lot less that has to be done or thought about for everyone else. So a little mission accomplished there, for now.

It's actually been rather nice to take a hold of doing something else, because I feel I'm getting way more achieved than just going over much testing and testing of the rigs for weeks on end, that aren't nearly ready for animation yet due to lack of facial control. Because of actively knocking more and more stuff off that huge to-do list, everything seems to be piecing itself together at a better rate and I've taken a big load of someone else's shoulders who'd have had more work to do. All good :) So when the rigs are fully ready, I can jump straight into animating and get going on that and working to get lots more knocked off that list. Awesome.

Below I have laid out most of the textures I've been doing and stuffed a couple in the same shot because as they are just variations of a similar type, they didn't deserve their own spotlight since they're pretty much the same kinda thing. They're done by near enough an order of start to finish, however they've all been screen grabbed since finishing this section first so extras such as with the first image, a few variations were done later:

After creating these textures, I wanted to see how well they worked in harmony with other, before starting on the mushrooms and the rest of the trees. This is a basic lighting test I made using a quickly thrown in environment light; I did this to make sure that all the textures I created stayed within the same colour palette. However, when I did lighting last year I knew that lighting can make or break a film, and it can also be played to an advantage to hide a lot of stuff, but since we are on massive time constraints there won't be time for a huge amount of testing time. That and it's far easier to keep everything within the same palette anyway, so I'll just go with the latter. So after some amount of scrutiny I made a few tweaks on the tallish sticky-with-a-bulb-on-the-top-plant (after and creating more variations for the palmy plant, I think it all looks rather coherent:

After working away on the low lying plants and trees of the jungle, next on the texturing agenda was the mushrooms. My favourites to texture along with the bulb plants, no idea why these appealed to me but at the time, painting these just came to me and I decided I loved mushrooms! It was nice to get given 4 different mushrooms to texture, 1 was without the circular (red-blood-cell-looking-things-on-the-sides) 2 mushrooms the same, but one had 2 small mushrooms poking out and the other didn't. The last one is not there because the tiff really didn't like the Maya view port at the time, but that one has a huuuge top and I'll point it out in a later post if it gets snapped.

After I'd finished plodding along with what I could for the jungly plants, it was onto the next mission: the camp scene, before heading back to animation as the rigs were nearing completion of fixing before I started the next few textures. Luckily though I managed to learn a lot about the texturing process and becoming quicker at knocking a texture map out. Now I find it a kind of second nature flitting around in photoshop, getting the right painterly feel. These were done in about a day and a bit with a polishing up:

The stove I started with first as I knew it would be kinda tricky to get the brassy/rusty feel to it which I think I managed to achieve. Looking back however I would approach painting the UV map differently, but that is the learning process for you. The frying pan somehow managed to be a bit of a mind boggler for me, just because I was probably tired, but they (for some reason) took me ages to get right. (Even if it is black and you don't see it that much.)

I've learnt so much more about photoshop in doing these textures, mainly with the use of brushes, grabbing two presets, combining them and changing the settings to get a good base brush coat. But mostly it's the use of colour and picking the right colour that I've learnt most about. At the start of doing these textures I would pick plenty of image reference to use and mix together these colours and create plenty of different tones and shades, that I would then use to paint the final texture. The more I got used to picking the colour off images, I would instinctively pick the right kind of hues to go with what I'm thinking about of that certain plant or object, so when it reached the mushroom texture from the colour changing thing (I don't remember the name) but in the colour I wanted. And this is the main reason I started relatively slowly in completing textures to begin with because of the process I had to undergo with learning colour and picking the right ones; and what I have learnt has been massively helpful and will undoubtedly prove invaluable to know when I come to create concept work and more textures.