BGP Week 5 – Character Skinning and Texturing

For week 5 of 7 in this project, my main focus was on the character, working on skinning, UV-mapping and texturing. Rigging and quick skinning had already been done, and since we use APEX Cloth for a big portion of the character, the primary area that needed work was the face. Mainly opening the eyes and mouth were prioritized.

Although a bit difficult to see, here is the facial rig I made. It’s rather simple, since we wouldn’t have time to animate the face very much in any case. As you can see, it features one single jaw bone. I realized later that I probably should have added joints for the corners of the mouth at the very least, since the character can’t really emote as it is now. The eyes have three joints per eyelid, in order to make sure that the shape is retained correctly as they open.

What I realized as I was skinning the eyelids was, that although a sound idea in itself, it really wasn’t necessary for our purpose, but rather I was able to get a good enough result by just skinning to the middle joint, and smoothing the skinning carefully to make sure that the different parts of the eyelid transformed correctly.

Next was the texturing. Using 3D Coat I very quickly UV-mapped both the characters body and clothing. The difference in efficiency between UV-mapping completely manually, and using an automatic mapper, is astronomical, and very important when on such a tight schedule as the one we’re on.

I started by quickly mapping out the various color fields using Mayas 3D-paint feature.This gave me a quick look at what colors I should use to best fit the concept art in 3D, and how the character would look in-game before I went into doing the actual texture.

Bringing the character into Mudbox, I started working on the final texture by outlining important patterns.

Then going into base colors:

Because of the cell-shader we use in our game, fine shadows disappear, meaning that we can’t rely on the in-game shading to convey the form. Rather, I worked in flat shading through-out the whole texturing process (as you can see in images above), and working in layers to shade it manually, as well as adding an ambient occlusion map, baked from Substance Designer.

That’s it for now. Until next time, let’s soar // Sky