Texturing

Texturing is in my opinion, one of the most difficult aspects of character modelling. It is Very clear however by developing the texture on the model, what looks natural and what doesn’t. Here I will show some examples of good texturing and some bad ones so you know what to avoid when texturing your character.

Here is a professional website taken from a Maya online forum. As you can see, this model is fantastically textured. The detail is amazing at how much care has been placed into this model. The character looks very realistic and the texture is fitted perfectly over the model with no evident gaps. The models maps work to great effect. The normal’s give the model a better depth to the character, and the specularity map has marked organic material (ie. Skin) over the dull coloured clothing and high specular belt buckle. By narrowing the white levels of an occlusion map, the modeller can create a highlight map to give the diffuse a bit of a push and really exaggerate the skin, which he has done here.

 

Here is a bad example of texturing. The model lacks any mapping and as a result, looks very flat and dull. There is no material added to the texture, just pure colour which again gives a flat appearance. In certain parts of the texture, colour has “spilt” onto different sections. If you look on the chest area, there are gaps of un-textured faces and on the models right hand, the red from the top has spilt onto the black glove. In general this is just a badly textured model. There is very little form on the skin, and as a result the face has no character whatsoever. There is no depth and resembles texturing from the very early stages of 3.D such as the N64’s gaming era. This model would never be able to be used in a final game. This is what we want to avoid in character creation.

Cartoon characters allow for some more freedom when texturing as the model does not have to look as realistic as possible as most next gen models have. Although they don’t require high definition texturing, there are still right and wrong ways of texturing them. 

Here is a bad example of cartoon texturing. This much like the previous model is dull and flat. No specular map has been added, the reflectivity of the surface is from the blinn material found in Maya. There is very little detail, although this can be overlooked for cartoons; however this model has literally no definition within the texture at all. It is very amateur and created with very little reference or thought.

Here is a much better example. Although made in a cartoon style, they have used a reference of armour to create a semi-realistic suit of armour. The block colour on his helmet has a normal map on it making it much more realistic. There has been a lot more care taken with this model and although the detail is minimal, it is still up to professional standard. This is what to aim for when texturing a more cartoon styled character.