Texturing and my experience with itIn this Blog I will talk about texturing and the experiences that I had with doing textures.

Texturing in 3D modelling and animation is the process of taking an image or colour such as a pink background or a denim picture and appalling it to a model with-in the 3D environment and so adding depth and skin colour to said model improving the look of realism for said model.

Example

With:

Without:

Texturing is a really good tool for 3D animation it makes your model come to life rather than look like something made out of clay in a pottery shop. Even simple textures can make your model look a great deal more alive and if applied properly can look very realistic. The only problem with texturing is trying to get the texture to be mapped correctly and this can be more difficult than it sound because of the size and complexity of some models that need to be textured there are quite a few ways of mapping different textures but they are all just as good as each other but they sometimes work better for certain types of models.

My High Res ExperienceDuring my project I had some difficulties with some of the texturing although in general it was splitting up the mesh UV so that the texture would look right on the model and not overlap and look weird.

one of the most annoying examples of this was when I was doing my /high Resolution model and I had to Texture the Body of my model, because of the size of the model and the shape it made it impossible to just planter map, cut and unfold the UVs right away that had worked in the past even if it was with some difficulties. So I decided to do what I had been show in a tutorial that I had done earlier the polygon texturing tutorial “solider” and split the sections of the body into more manageable sections that I hoped I could UV map on there own. so I first hide of the extra layers part from that of my characters body then I went into faces mode and selected the faces round one of the arms making sure the faces I selected where not intruding on the body and mostly covered up by the Jacket that went on

top of the body so that should there be some slight discrepancies between the Textures that I was going to set and that of another piece of the body the most noticeable part the seem would be covered and not visablie easily.

I then extracted that arm this made the arm that I had selected with the faces tool an object on it’s own that would be easier to map in theory I went and did this for the other arm, the legs and the head (at this time I hadn’t yet created the hands for the model).

Afterwards I took the bits of the body and mapped them in different ways so that the UV didn’t overlap and spoil the texture that had been applied to them in most of the cases this worked after some time trying to split the polygon edges in the right place to get a nice UV map unfortunately this wasn’t the case for the right arm and I had to eventually get rid of it and replace it with a duplicate of the left arm that I then had to attach to the other side of the body.

Bad Arm UV map

See the over lapping at the top the darker blue area

Good Arm UV map

Although it doesn’t look that great there are no darker patches and so the Mesh will take to the arm well

Most of the maps for this went well even if they looked somewhat odd apart from the torso because of how it had been made(The Chest Muscle definition) it was especially difficult to map fortunately because it was almost completely covered by the jacket there was no need to map it properly because It wouldn’t be seen.

For the rest of the clothing I also had to create textures and map them so that they looked nice but when I was mapping the trousers and that of the top I found that because of the type of mesh I was trying apply to the model when I cut the UV’s so that I could unfold them a had a huge line down the back of the model that was very visible this also happened for the trousers to which I was using the same texture for. I eventually decided that the texture actually looked better with-out the UV’s being mapped properly and so just did a basic map that had the front and back overlapping each other the sides of the model is where you can see that this is the case but because of the texture it looks like it’s part of the design.

Overall the texturing that did with-in the high resolution model was pretty basic most just being textures that I didn’t change and just applied on the models and got working nicely, along with a few bump maps to try to make the texture look more realistic. As well as this I also mapped certain bits of models to different maps such as with the top I applied both a blinn with a shiny metal colour on it and that of a Lambert with a texture on it.

Avatar ExperienceIn my assignment with the avatar I found the texturing to be much easier than I had with the high Res model I think this is because of the lower poly count although there where some problems that I couldn’t fix in some areas. The texturing that did with the avatar was very much the same as that I did with the high Res model the only difference is that used a 3D texture in the avatar for some of the bump maps but apart from that the avatar at least in the form of texturing is much the same as that of the high Res model.