Digital Painting Color Maps - Game Character Creation with Blender and Unity - page 143

Now you will set up the workspace. Open your digital painting/
photo manipulation program of choice and follow these steps:
1. Using the program's File menu, open the UV layout you cre-
ated at the end of Chapter 4, “Prepping for Zombie Details
with UV Unwrapping,” or use the file Zombie_UVs.tif from the
topic's web page at www.sybex.com/go/gameblenderunity , in the
Chapter 6 folder.
2. If you used the default settings in Blender, the opacity of this
file will be at 25 percent. This means that the model's faces
will appear clear with a slight white tint. This allows you to
know where your topology is while letting you see your work
on layers below the UVs.
You will want layers beneath this UV image. To add a new
layer in 2D art programs, you'll use the menu for adding lay-
ers in the menu bar (like the one in Figure 6.10) or a button
near the layer window (like the one in Figure 6.11). Make sure
your layer is below the UV layout by dragging the layer to the
bottom of the layer stack.

3. Open the normal map from Chapter 5, “Sculpting for Normal
Maps,” or download Professor_Zombie_normal.tif from the
topic's web page in the Chapter 6 folder. Place this on the
layer directly below the UVs and above the layer you added
in the previous step so it is sandwiched between the two. You
will use the bottom layer as your first painting layer and the
Normal and UV layers as guides (Figure 6.12).
4. On the Normal Map layer, lower the opacity of the layer to about 50 percent. This will
allow you to see your work under the normal map.
5. Open your model sheet for the zombie in another tab or window of the art program.
ArtRage allows you to use an image as a reference image that can be tacked next to
your workspace. Using one of these methods, make sure you have the model sheet
easily accessible so you can use the ink dropper tools to get colors for your painting.
Figure 6.13 shows the workspace in ArtRage.
Now that you have your workspace set up, you can properly paint your color map for
the zombie. The next section will discuss some best practices for digital painting.

Figure 6.10
The Layer menu in
Photoshop

Figure 6.11
The New Layer but-
ton in ArtRage