Week Summary - BA1b Week 3+

(This includes work finished over the christmas period)

Barrel texturing

This week we moved on to some more complex texturing, creating a barrel with a hand-painted texture. Although I found the UV mapping a little confusing, I really enjoyed the painting part of the process, and love the cute low-poly style I can achieve with these methods. Below are some step-by-step images of the process.

Above I noticed that there was a slight seam on the model, which is in some ways to be expected, but I still did my best to paint it out.

At this point I somehow lost my model, although I still had an incomplete texture map. Rather than create an entirely new texture, I finished my incomplete version, and then rebuilt and remapped a similar barrel. I then exported my new UV map, and adjusted the texture to fit it. I unfortunately had to collapse my non-destructive layers in order to do this, but I know the process now and am confident in the workflow having run through it several times.

Original layer structure

I found this non-destructive workflow to be a really interesting one, and can definitely see its applications and how useful it can be, especially for texturing. Masking was not a technique I had ever tried before, and though I probably won't use it to this extent aside from for projects like these, I've already started putting it to some use in my personal work.

Unfinished UV map used above

Finished UV map 

Below is the finished barrel, I'm very happy with the end style - a little cartoony and fun but still nice-looking. I may come back to this a little later and add some more wear and tear to it (paint, scratches, etc) but for now I'm satisfied with this as it is.

Crit Session

We also had a critique session this week, unfortunately due to it being so late in the term there weren't many people there, but it was still good to see what others had taken from the same brief. The amount of diversity was something I found quite surprising, and some people's work was, I felt, on a whole other level to my own. Although I'm still hoping to work in 2D areas, I want to improve my 3D skills as well for a more rounded skill set, and to allow me to explore ideas in as many ways as possible. This means doing more independent 3D work, and developing my skills in my own time, maybe doing a small 3D project as practise. I'm fairly familiar with UE4, so setting up some small scenes might be a good exercise for me.