Back in UVland

I began the week by going over the remaining notes on my poses and addressing each one.
In addition, I started duplicating pieces and constraining them to Justin's hands so that for certain portions of the piece--where he is holding a piece/group of pieces in a single position--the hand animation will lead the piece. To avoid the visibility switch problem Lauren had (where Mental Ray rendered all the pieces regardless of their visibility), I took her suggestion and did a scale switch instead where over one frame one piece scales up from zero and one scales down to zero, having the same effect as the visibility switch but not having the possibility of rendering problems.

I still have a few things I want to deal with in these basic poses, but I decided it was time to go back and work on skin weighting (just briefly) and texturing.

I spent a day attempting to figure out the eyebrow wrap problem with no success, so instead I fixed the weighting on his right shoulder and finished laying out his UVs.
At the moment I've drawn textures for all of Justin except his shoes, eyebrows and hair pieces. I also still have to texture the insides of all the planet pieces (perhaps I can draw one texture that I apply in various ways to each of them...), and figure out the stretching of the outer planet texture on the green piece.

Below are a couple renders of Justin currently, with almost all of his texturing done.



Each texture is a lambert shader with the color map an imported scan of colored pencil drawing on vellum. From far away they look soft and hand-drawn, but I posterized the images in photoshop to give an edgy, grainy look so that close up the "innocent, childlike" nature that is seen from afar actually has an older, edgier sensibility to it.



There are also some drawn details to bring a sense of reality to the piece, while the geometry itself is still fairly boxy and simple. This adds a playful sense of puppetry to the piece--and an artisan/craftsmanship of carefully laying out the textures and UVs for each polygon as though done by hand.



I'm trying to find a balance between adding detail and making it stylized. As can be seen with the hand above, there is an obvious effort to denote fingernails, but only subtly, a little detail to emphasize aspects of human anatomy and clothing, while keeping it simple enough to not even vaguely suggest an attempt at realism.


I haven't yet decided whether the outline idea that I used in the elephant piece will be applied here, but it feels very 3d at the moment and I'd like to "funkify" it. I think using outlines could prove effective, though not the built in toon shader outlines that feel separate from the character--id rather using the facing ratio node the way toon shaders used to be created, which gives a more organic (as in part of the geometry--not as in part of nature) feel to it. I intend to finish up Justin's hand drawn textures in the next day or two and experiment some with the outline concept. But I have to get back to animating early next week, so hopefully my aesthetic will come together quickly!