Texturing as Dev Diary Pt. 2 (Patreon)

Okay, we're back. 

Little problem with the face in the last post: I realized I'd put the eyes on the brows and created even stranger proportions than I usually mean to or allow. So that's why his eyes were confiscated. If he's agreeable he'll get them back toward the end of this demonstration. 

Decided to make him t-shirt to make up for having his eyes plucked out. All the beauty and magic of Blender, with its procedurally generated cloth effects and blah blah...Not for me. Not yet. 

No. We drag an drop a bit of that big rectangular hamhock to create what could be the hanging drapery of a t-shirt. Of course. This is how we do this. 

Why does his crotch look like an obscene origami? Why is he so pimpled with details, why does he have skin that looks like a piece of broken glass glued to a balloon? 

Don't ask these things. There are days where make only beautiful, funny things and others where you seem to have unlearned every hard earned bit of craft you had. It is one of these latter days.

Getting a leg skin color. When you make such a small picture selection over such a large space you lose a lot of detail but right now we don't care -- and maybe we never will for this guy, seeing as he's going to be a low poly little creep.

I think I might turn him into a sprite after this too, with a new process brilliant twitter friends have cooked up. Getting ahead of myself again. Let's get his limbs all flesh colored and see how we're doing. 

Maybe not. Very bad. Also, his bizarre legs will be amended a bit. Or turned into the basis for his weird cyborg implants. We'll see. 

His new knee caps are crying out for color so I'm looking at the bit of reddish, tanned skin on her face. If I'm clever (and probably not tonight, but who knows) I might even be able to make it look very nice and "natural". A gradient rather than a sudden change. Who knows. 

I'll repeat this kind of process for the arms as well, so he'll have an elbow that's a little more leathery than the rest of him. Should use sunscreen, considering he lives in an ozone free world where excessive hairspray use was never curtailed but instead accelerated. ("Coughing and unventilated rooms, that's what rock and roll means to me...") 

Hey, that's looking way more skin/leg/knee-y. Those freakish knee caps are going to be adorned with metal and "plasteel" or similar futuristic substances soon but I still want to get his clothes figured out. 

So here's our boy so far: Fleshy legs and arms.

Still no eyes. And his massive had may end up shrunken, but who knows: maybe his cranium is bloated with implanted transpecies tissue grafts. Cetacean brain tissue, trained to play nice with the HomoSap stuff and giving our man unprecedented emotional intelligence. Yes. I think he's some kind of pick up artist of the future. A "cool guy". 

With that in mind, it's time to do his t-shirt and shorts. I am resisting the urge, and it's a strong (and sinister) urge, to just give him some kind of short sleeve onesie. No. Two garments. We're staying strong. 

Let's look at shirt fodder:

An actual shirt, with texture and wrinkles is a big maybe. I should have cut more, but this bit of a red flag from an old poster might be it. Or I go with the graphics idea. I'll make a decision once we're experimenting--and for ease, as the shirt is going to be the star, I think I'll do the shorts first. They can be simple. 

Lol.

Tempted to give him some little red shorts. Little Christopher Robin MFer. 

These are the shorts I think. Stolen from some Italian (Flemish?) creep of the distant past. Shiny back piece becomes funky striped shorts, ripped for everyone's pleasure. 

Looking sharp. 

Sometimes to deal with the many types of visual confusion that comes out of this style of model creation I'll do what I did with the shirt here: select all the vertices and just stick them over on a color that contrasts the rest. I'll have to fuck with it all later, but at least for the moment we can look at the skin, the shorts, and so on. We can get an idea of a direction to go for color now too, as we know what color his skin and the shorts will be. 

Shoes. I'm a big fan of weird sneakers. Really, his sneakers are intolerably small (unless they were some kind of tabi sock thing...) but I'm not going to change them now. I do want them to have another sort of texture though, something that implies futuristic materials in that showy, "sports" sort of way rather than just cyber shit. Let's see if a photo can provide something outlandish enough to be athleisure footwear. 

Maybe. Getting somewhere. Also thinking that a real photo for a graphic tee might be very funny (and now thinking of fake decals, graphics, etc. to make in Affinity--hold on, hold on...)

I am live writing this. Meaning, I work, I stop and take screen caps of what I just did, and then muse on where to go next. I might do this more, both on Patreon (I think people would enjoy that) and in general. It helps with focus and you can see how many asides/random urges pop up that must be corralled. 

Now that's a futuristic sports shoe, made of brick walls and a black car. Couldn't resist and sunk in a few details and selected other wall textures to imply some kind of exposed mesh or multiple materials thing. It'd need tender love and care to really pull off/read, but that brief moment of enthusiasm is a good sign in model making, in my experience. Onwards. 

Shirt experiment time. 

Wow, he sure is a way cool dude. I like the contrast between all the yellow and browns and that bright blue. So that's our boy, for now. 

 Let's give him his eyes back. 

Face: fiddled: Shorts: Good. Shirt? No. I don't like it. I may do some shit in Affinity later but for now I think I will do now work on the texture without mirroring turned on. 

I guess I should have mentioned earlier, but I turn on a mirror filter when I start most models so it's easy to create symmetrical shapes. It alsos makes texturing easy (it was so reasssuring to replay Combat Evolvedd and see how many obviously mirrored textures were used) except for when you want a simple, non-symmetrical image dead center. 

Once I've turned off mirroring I start the rigging processs (which would be a different post, if people want that too) so I may run off in that direction but then we also haven't made him a weird cyborg yet...

So let's say Pt. 2 is done and we'll revisit our bulbous blue boy (or an iteration--must make a note to save different stages of a model more often) when we see what direction we'll take him. 

Going to continue on this boy tonight and tomorrow, where I'll show off finishing touches, changes in design, etc. 

As a little bonus here he is so far, rendered in that beautiful 640 x 480. 

Also, final bonus: little spotify playlist I made from things on my shuffle I enjoyed while making these posts for you guys. 

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3dVqOaMFJ7GRVgktBaWJuC?si=02f5afc2ff3e40e1

Let's February didn't happen. Let's say we're starting the New Year triumphantly. Here's to more posts.