Summer Texturing

At the start of the term I didn't have the confidence to UV map Summer, so we gave it to a second year animation student called Jure Bralic who was praised by Dan as being a competent UV mapper. After a couple of days he returned the Summer scene file to us we a full UV map ready for me to work with, he also made an annotated version of the map (shown below) and gave it to me to help me understand the layout and know what part is what.

The annotated layout was very useful and saved me valuable amounts of time which would have been spent on figuring out what part of the UV represented what part of the body, this could have taken as much as half a day so I'm incredibly grateful for Jure for taking the time to do that for me.

In terms of the actual texturing process for Summer I didn't encounter any problems, I did have a few minor problems where some parts of the UV's were a bit too squashed and close together making it hard to apply detail to the textures without having them look stretched once applied to the model, apart from that everything was absolutely fine and I got the textures finished within 2 days of starting them. I took some creative license to add my own little touches to the texture, the main thing I added was freckles to Summers face across her checks and nose (image below), it was only a subtle detail but I received a lot of positive feedback from people who saw the textured model, it's a detail that you don't consciously notice, but you can see it and it makes a huge difference to the look of the face.

I added a phong material to make the buttons look like they are made of plastic, it's important to make sure certain details like this exist otherwise the textures could fall flat and not work as well as they could.

This is a final render showing the finished texture on Summer, I gave a separate scene file to Laura Haile which contains the UV maps, Laura is currently rigging the characters so when we get the scene file back from her I can import the texture from this file into the one she gives us.