Environment Lighting

These past few weeks i have been finishing texturing my environment, adding some detail to the parts of it that are visible, and adding some character with some wall displays. On top of that, i have been lighting my textured environment, and have reached a render that looks quite nice:

This is using a bunch of different lightings and some global illumination and final gather settings. The drawers on the right are not really seen in many of the shots, so their texturing is very basic.

I have also rigged all of my characters to an acceptable standard, and they are now ready to animate! Unfortunately, some problems have arised with the lighting that i'm using causing unacceptable artifacts on the skin shader of my characters, as seen below:

I'm currently seeking advice from the internet, and may ask some tutors at some point, although none of them work in my program, so are unlikely to be able to solve this specific issue.

I'm also taking stock today, taking the amount of time i have remaining into account and editing my animatic. I'm going to refine and finalise all my camera shots, maybe take a few out if i can. At present, i am confident i can finish in time, with my biggest worry being the rendering. If nothing else goes wrong with the renderer this shouldn't be too much of an issue, but i have just upgraded my PC to be sure, and now have access to two high powered rigs to run off my renders.

Work on priest textures

Been hard at work on my priest's textures. His body took me ages, but since i documented my process for my professor and this was much the same, i'll skip straight to the results.

Little Girl Textures

Been working on my little girl's textures, focusing on her clothes to begin with. Here's how it's looking so far:

Prof Face Texture adjustments

Once i had the basic texture right, i decided to collapse the symmetry so i could make the textures unique on each side of the face. You can see in the image below how his forehead wrinkles are mirrored, and it doesn't look great.

 

Upon doing this, i decided to redo all of the textures to make them more subtle and fix any problems i saw. Once i had done this, i went through a bunch of settings in the renderer to try and fix them. Here are a few renders of the stages i went through whilst fine tuning:

And here is the stage i am now happy with.

Prof Face Texture

I have now done more texturing work on my professor, unwrapping and texturing his head.

I've used a SubSurface Scatter Skin material, and have painted and plugged some mats into several diffuse channels, a bump and a specular channel.

Although i'm not completely finished, i'm quite pleased with the results so far:

Texturing Process Breakdown

I've made some more progress on my texturing of my professor, so i thought i'd do a little breakdown of my process here.

First i start by unwrapping the model, by selecting a set of faces, and applying a basic unwrap mode to it (e.g. planar or cylindrical), or by using my QucikUnwrap script to get a basic unwrap. I then finesse the shape in the editor, using a checker texture as an aid. The unwrapped UVs are laid out to fit on the sheet.

 A texture is sourced, from my own clothes if possible. Using a photoshop filter and clone stamp the texture is made to tile. It is then duplicated to fill the chosen area of the sheet.

 At this point I apply the texture to the model, and look for any problem areas. In the case below the texture was warped where some UVs were not welded together properly, and was easily fixed.

 

 Once the texture looks roughly right on the model, I "paint" some seams on, by using the dodge and burn tools to give the impression of a edge.

 Then, by editing our brush settings, I create a brush that paints on some stitches, to give some detail to the seams. You can see the brush settings below:

This process is replicated over all the other relevent areas of the model.

Finally, once i'm satisfied with the texture, i flatten it, and desaturate it to turn it into a bump map. On review, i normally edit the levels, and paint some more contrast onto areas, such as the pocket below.

And there is one textured model. At present i am working on half of a model that i have applied symmetry to. Once i am ready to collapse the stack, i will do so, and fix any parts that need to be non-symmetrical, such as the flies on these trousers.