Texturing update for last 2 weeks.

Due to the problems I have had with zbrush's exporter I have now only 4 statues. I have spent over a week texturing these statues. It got easier as I went along as each model had a similar process in terms of work flow- use a base texture which was a marble texture, tile it, use the clone stamp tool and then add the vines and grime.

Self-Evaluation.
I thought I did well, but I didn't do too well in terms of planning ahead in my opinion. One of the benefits of this has been that I feel that I am more down-to-earth with my texturing abilities and the amount of time that it will take me to get these sort of things done- which is quite a long time because I like to make sure that I do a good job. I think I did well with applying some industry standard techniques in to my work flow- using Photoshop, the Hypershade and the 3D paint tool all in conjunction with each other.


I used the 3D paint tool predominantly for the vines because I made things complicated by making the vines wrap around the statues legs. I think what also made it easier as I went along was that I re-used some of the same Photoshop layers for the vines and grime. This made the process really quickly for one of my statues as I had put too much grime on the defensive statue, so I fixed this statue up with in the hour which is a personal record for me as (as mentioned above) a texturing a model takes about a day.

Something that I haven't done well is balance this project with my other ones- compositing project has really suffered.

Other comments.
From doing this modelling project, it has made me realise just how much I prefer animating. Modelling, I find stretches me and makes me think, granted that's a good thing and I have enjoyed the Zbrush sculpting aspect, but I still prefer animating and I can see myself animating as a career rather than anything else.

I shall post pictures of my sculptures up later.

Week starting- 23rd February.
Texturing is now complete. We agreed as a group that we need one more week for texturing which means we would have had 4 weeks for modelling and texturing. We have now used up our reserved week (which we took in to consideration in our planning as we knew that not everything will go perfectly).
We then found out that Diogo was unfortunately unable to do any texturing on the buildings, which has put us another week behind. Diogo also came in late which meant that I had to send him another email (we had given everybody plenty of warning using emails) on the day asking where he was. Diogo sent us his files using rapid share, but the files he sent us were compressed using a format that could not be recognized by our macs (most of our group members have macs), fortunately the files could be unpacked using a desktop PC we were using at college. So as none of the buildings had been properly UV mapped we have split the buildings among us so that the texturing can be complete. Because of these unfortunate events the buildings won't have as much quality invested in them as we would like.
We have scheduled the group to be in on Thursday 25th February in order for the scene to be properly put together i.e. importing all the assets.

Group Evaluation.
Upon reflection I think the project may been over ambitious, I just think that most of us didn't have enough knowledge or experience in modelling and texturing for us to have done all the work quick enough and that the work may not have been equally shared.

Self-Evaluation.
I've learnt the importance of tidy modelling and naming conventions, as I inherited a 3D building from Diogo to texture, and I was amazed at how much stuff I had to delete. I think I did well in terms of trying to pull things together and recover from the fact that none of the buildings had been textured for the group and trying to come up with solutions so that we could come to some kind of compromise. I have also phoned Clym and Fahran to ask about what textures they have used for their buildings so that we can keep the consistency and still try and make it a run down greek environment which has only recently been abandoned. I think I have also done well on planning my work out and trying to balance my compositing project with UV mapping and texturing this huge building. I have also been able to adapt to changes in plan. (See screen-shots below).


Above: plan I made in the morning (despite what it says in the top write).




So UV mapping this building has taken far longer than I wanted to I planned 3-4 hours to UV map and texture this building, and I finished UV mapping this building around 2 oclock which means I have spent 6 hours on this- too long, not good!

Screen shots of UV mapping below.


The building which I had to texture was one of the largest in the scene, this is the bulk of it in 0-1 in the UV texture editor. I used planar mapping.


For my own reference: I assigned different colored Lambert Shaders to the different sections of this big building. I thought these different colours would show up in the UV Texture Editor but it didn't which left me having to annotate my screen shots (please see above).




For my own reference, I annotated my screen shots so that I know what I'm texturing when in Photoshop.

What I could improve on is not being caught up on the detail, as I have spent too long on UV mapping.

UV map screen shot of me using 3D paint tool on big building that I was given to UV map. I stopped doing this and used planar mapping.