Digital Painting Color Maps - Game Character Creation with Blender and Unity - page 145

References Are Your Friends
A lot of new artists will assume that the most “artistic” and “pure” way to create digital
art is to do it completely from their heads. If they are drawing a gun, for example, the
image needs to be created completely from memory or imagination. While this is great
for geniuses and masters, the professional artist will often use a reference image of
some sort.
References can save you time and aggravation while you work and help you create bet-
ter art. Common references include photographs (Figure 6.14) and images downloaded
off the Internet.
Figure 6.14
Photos make great
bases for digital
painting.
Blender itself is a great source for references. Some shapes would be difficult to create
from your mind and draw in perspective, so creating a 3D mockup can be immensely
helpful (Figure 6.15).
Digital painting for color maps is even more reliant on reference images. For your
digital painting of the zombie's color map, you have already set up a file with the zombie's
UVs and normal map. UVs are absolutely essential when creating painted color maps. In
many ways, coloring this way gives your kindergarten teacher's mantra of “color in the
lines” a whole new meaning, as the lines on a UV dictate model topology.
The normal map can be even more useful, telling you where to paint the gruesome
details of your zombie. Earlier in the chapter, you were told that shading in a color map
has to be more generalized, following ambient occlusion rather than a light source. Your
normal map can help key you into these areas by showing the seams that you created in
your sculpting. For this specific model, you can also add harrowing details that follow the
damage you sculpted into the zombie's surface. The result will be a color map that works
perfectly with your sculpting (Figure 6.16).