Digital Painting Color Maps - Game Character Creation with Blender and Unity - page 139

Figure 6.4
An early-progress
digital painting in
ArtRage Studio Pro
Cost-wise, it straddles the line between the open source programs and proprietary appli-
cations; it costs money but is still relatively inexpensive for this type of software. A new
copy of ArtRage Studio Pro costs $80, whereas the less-featured ArtRage Studio costs $40.
These are but a few of the options available to digital artists for their color map work.
Internet research will undoubtedly reveal other options that appeal to you, so choose
what program works best for your project, goals, and budget.
Digital Painting for Color Maps
Digital painting for color maps is different from digital painting for design. Whereas typ-
ical digital painting allows you to draw with typical rules of figure, proportion, and com-
position within your particular art style, color maps are often painted onto flattened UV
maps. The resulting image can be somewhat unusual. See Figure 6.5, in which the colors
extend beyond their UV islands so no white lines appear on the textured model.
The principles of digital painting in this way involve following the topology of the 3D
model in such a way that colors on different UV islands match up with one another. This
often involves saving new versions of a color map and then reloading the file in Blender to
see how it looks in 3D (Figure 6.6).
Shading can be difficult to achieve on these textures. In typical digital painting, you
create a light source and paint according to the placement and color you decide for the
light. In color map painting, you paint to enhance lighting that occurs in the 3D program
or engine you are using. In this way, you will want to paint areas where shadows will
appear between surfaces on the model—seams, curves, and other areas where light will
most likely not shine strongly—and you probably won't want to paint very dark shadows.