Making of Lensha by Loocas Duber, Czech Republic (Europe)


UV Mapping

The UV mapping took place after everything was modeled. However, since my DVDs cover modeling the head only, on the second DVD, I was unwrapping and mapping the head only as well. The rest of the model was mapped afterwards, for the sake of this rendering. The mapping was pretty simple. The geometry counts weren’t so high after all and therefore the mapping was also quick and hassle-free. I recommend my second DVD to everyone, who isn’t certain about mapping or who has never done it before, or even to people who are interested in some tips, tricks and how-tos regarding UV mapping, as because the DVD was created as a general reference that touches Max directly very briefly, because all the techniques explained, could be very easily applied to any 3d application on the market.

So, for the models, I didn’t use any fancy features or plugins or what not, I went for the straightest forward and classical technique there is. I first chose some basic UV projection method, usually cylindrical projection, and then I fine-tuned the UVs in the unwrap editor. You can see on the images, I was using a specially created map for previewing UV coordinates in my viewports for easier navigation and reading. You can create your own, just like I did, if you want to. I prefer this over the standard dual-colored checker procedural, because thanks to those letters and numbers, as well as the different colors; I can simply read the map and determine its rotation and position on the object’s surface, very handy!



Texturing

Again, this section was completely and in-depth explained on my third DVD. However, it was, once again, in relation with the head only, as that was the objective for the DVDs. So, to sum up the entire process, first of all, I had to determine how big the textures should be. This is always the first thing I do when painting textures, because it’s quite important to get the size right at the very beginning, because later, if you discover you didn’t make the texture big enough to feed all the detail into your render, you’re in big trouble, because that’d usually mean re-painting all the texture from scratch! There’s no ultimate formula to determine how big your textures should be, but generally, the bigger, the better :) You can always scale them down. But, there’s also a tip in how to set the size for the textures. Take your object as it will appear on your final render and measure how much space it takes on the render. Then multiply this number by two and you, theoretically, get the right size for its texture. Ofcourse, you can do this only for the main objects on your render, not for every single detail. Also, you’ll develop a certain sense for estimating such things as practice.



Back to the texturing, once I’ve determined all the texture sizes for the individual objects, I rendered the objects’ UV templates to be placed as a guide while painting the textures. I don’t use any 3rd party texture painters aside from Photoshop. That’s the only tool I’m most confident in and that was the tool of choice for this project as well. As I said, I brought the UV references into Photoshop and based on the texture type I either painted them from scratch (such as the ski-pass band or the logos on the ski-cap) or I used actual photos I took with my camera and manipulated and touched them heavily in order to create distortion-free, seam-less textures. It was a lot of fun, but also, quite time consuming at the same time. The toughest challenge, as usual, I consider the creation of all the bump maps. As you may know, the bump maps are quite important and generally, no matter how good your other channels (diffuse, reflection, 3S, specular etc...) are, if the bump map is wrong, the entire material will look wrong.


So, therefore I paid quite some time to the bump maps and tried not to cheat them. If you think that simply by desaturating and tweaking the diffuse channel you’ll get a cool bump map, it’s not entirely true, yes, you’ll get pretty close, however, certain areas (for example freckles, blemishes, generally dark spots) may not be the same, value wise, on the bump map, so therefore I had to go in and re-touch some of these problems. The cloth was the most painful in this case, since the photos weren’t of very high quality and I had to paint the bump maps for the clothes almost from scratch. The materials on the objects seen on the render used various channels. All of them used diffuse, specular and bump channels, naturally, however, some of them also used reflection, 3S and displacement channels. The displacements were also painted in Photoshop in 8-bit only, as I didn’t want to bring the models in ZBrush for some high-frequency detailing in 16-bit, because the displacement weren’t very high and the 256 levels sufficed enough.