Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Tips and Tricks
Often you will see another way of working with character UVs that includes
making a separate UV set for the face and head. The idea here is that
the character will use two materials, one for the face (which is the most
important part of most characters) and another for all the body. This often
means that the face gets as much texture as the rest of the body combined.
If the game calls for close-ups of the character, this is indeed a great
way to work. However, for this project, there will be no close-ups, so to
keep the draw calls down there will be only one texture for the whole
character, including the face.
However, to cheat just a bit, the head and face shell in
Figure 9.43
is a little
bigger than it should be. Since there is an easy seam between the neck
and the clothes, we can make the head UV shell just a tad larger to use a
bit more of the texture space without throwing off the balance of textures
on the rest of the model.
Step 61:
Delete all history. Keep the file clean.
Step 62:
Export the UV Map. Select AC_AegisChung in Object Mode.
In the UV Texture Editor select Polygons>UV Snapshot. For now set the
resolution to 2048×2048 and save it as AegisChungUV. This will be the file
used to paint the texture in the next tutorial. Changing the Image Format
to TIFF will often yield more predictable results.
Conclusion
Now on to the fun part. The UV map is laid out, the snapshot is taken, and the
file is available for painting in Photoshop. In the next tutorial we will look at
a few quick techniques for using photos as our source for character texture
painting.
Tutorial 9.2: Character Texture Painting
For the most part, texturing is texturing and the techniques used to texture
the level are similar to those used to texture a character: lay down a base
texture and layer on dirt, seams, and folds. Because of this, we will move
quickly in this tutorial until we get to the area of the face.
The head is really the only skin we see on this character. There are many ways
of attacking the face of a character. Many times students in class with some
good painting skills are able to create really interesting textures from scratch
by painting within Photoshop. Still others will print out the UV map and use
more traditional media (often gouache) to paint a skin texture that they then
scan and work back into the UV map within Photoshop. Often these result in
very stylized textures, which can be really great for the right project.
