Character Texture - Sep '06

This was a study in using decal sheets to texture characters. This is the method typically used in gaming since it is easy to add extra detail in the decal sheets that do not have to be modeled on the character itself, e.g. muscles, wrinkles in the skin, pocket on the shirt, zipper, etc. This was the original character for the short film I am working on, although its been redone several times since. The texture works by first creating a UV map in Maya to map each vertex on the character model to some place in a square 2D image space. This is shown on the left of the above image. This simply tells Maya where to look when coloring each vertex. On the right is the texture I created using Adobe Photoshop. When I apply it back on the model I get the image above. I am by no means a texture artist, but it is quite easy to get decent looking results. We ultimately decided not to use this character for the film though because some of the scenes required the arm twisting in ways that warped the texture and made it distracting, so we instead plan on using cloth.

More can be found on the film under the Current Work section.