Texturing

Alas, my studio project is near completion.  All the textures have been made (they've been done for about a week now.......why do I procrastinate so much), applied and I'm now waiting for my 4,300 render images to finish (btw, at 8 mb per file that's almost 35 gigs of pictures now on my mac.  I have 7 days worth of music, which is only 6 gigs).

First up, Vienna.  I went into the painting process knowing that I wanted to paint her Kingdom Hearts style, not photo-realism.  Not knowing any better, I did most of the painting in Photoshop.  It's a very long and tedious task of fixing blends, flipping things and testing to see how blurry things were.  Thankfully, a good friend showed me ambient occlusion, which helped a bunch with mastering the shadows of the face/clothing.

I started with the face.  The hardest thing.  I have never sworn so much in my life; mostly because I didn't know where to start.  I started with the neck and moved my way around the head, moving to the ear, then the forehead, eyes, nose and finishing with the red lips.  I used the AO to help paint in the shadows for the nose/eyes.  I don't think I would have had the motivation to even finish the face or the model if that AO layer wasn't there to help me.  But I pushed through it. Blending was fairly easy since only had to paint half the face since I stacked uv's on top of each other. 
Easiest: the Ears - I don't know why but it was fun to paint the ears.
Middle: the Lips - The only reason the lips were hard was because I really messed up the uv maps.  I had to spend a bit more time fighting with my textures to match the uv's.
Harest: THE NOSE!  WHY DO WE HAVE NOSES!!! IF WE DIDN'T NEED THEM TO BREATH, I'D CHOP THEM ALL OFF!!!!!!  Yeah I had fun.  The nose took the longest to paint. Both the bridge, nostrils and just the general shape took me so long to get right. 

Next came the rest of the skin, all of it was fairly simple....until I got to the hands.  Brick wall.  Yet again, my good friend came to the rescue and introduced me to Bodypaint, a projection painting program.  I had a "Where have you been all my life" moment.  Rather then painting on a flat image in Photoshop, the program allowed me to paint directly onto the model.  No more worrying about blending everything perfectly, no more seams, and those little details were so much easier to paint.  I used the program to paint her hands (brick wall, brick wall), her hair and her top.  All three I had first attempted to do several times in Photoshop, but failed.

Everything else on the model was done in Photoshop.

Techy Stuff: Her texture map is 2048 x 2048.  It was applied with 90% ambient and 10% diffuse to achieve that Kingdom Hearts look.

Lessons learned: Never doing skirts again, noses blows, and I really like painting hair.  Even if it isn't the greatest hair in the world, I still enjoyed making it.

Here's the texture map, along with a render.  Her final color will be shown more in a later post that will have multiple views of her.