All these posts seem to be focusing on the Fox character, when there is so much else going on with the project. But we need to keep some secrets to ourselves (insert maniacal laughter).
Here is a sneak peak at some of the conversations that go on in the developer forums. Makes you want to sign up and contribute, doesn’t it?
Post by Andrew Gardner.
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After I got the go ahead to texture, the first thing I took into consideration was my lights.
I was using a sky light for no reason in the beginning as it lights the object evenly with out having to play with any settings. It was just by chance that when I turned the shadows off from the light that it gave a very nice clean cartoon look.
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Next I started off by sectioning off my texture map.
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Here you will see it is all laid out nice and flat.
One thing that I should point out is that I have placed similar parts on top of each other. So for instance, I have the fox split down the middle. I then take the right leg and reverse it within the texture mapping and place it on top of the left leg’s texture map. What this does is when I texture the 1 leg I am texturing them both at the same time and they will be identical.
Also if you look I only have 2 round objects on the map. I have placed both bells on top of each other as well as placing all the orbs from the necklace on top of each other. Again when I texture one, I texture all of them at the same time
I then pull this image (the rendered out texture map) up in photo shop.
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Here is where I go in and select the polies I want to texture. I have my texture mapping open in 3DS Max and when I highlight the poly I want in 3D, it highlights in the texture map. I then compare the texture map in 3DS Max with the texture map that I have pulled up in Photoshop.
You can do it how you like but take the pen tool and then place a dot on each poly in photo shop showing me which polies I am going to be placing color over.
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You can make your textures however you want. What I find is helpful is when making the model,to keep the model clean and straight I can use my poly lines as my guides and just color in the polies. If they are not straight in photo shop, it does not matter. What does matter is that the grid of my polies on the model are set how I want them and the transition will come out how I want.
Here I took the lasso tool and selected the polies I wanted to color over. I then selected the colors given to me from the concept art and used the gradient tool to make the transition from the blue to white. I might take a few times to get it right, and you might have to do rounded area in a few sections, but in the end you just want to make sure you don’t get any hard transition from 1 section of your texture map to another if they are not connected.
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Here is a overlay to show you the base mapping under the colored map.
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So far the steps above will give you a nice cartoon look, but you will not have the lines that define the different parts of the object, for that we must move on to the cell shader part
The cell shader really is not part of the texture map. In 3DS Max you have multiple channels; in one of the channels I placed a “Falloff” modifier. I then played with transition curve for the lighting until it looked something like this.
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My lines look different. The center section is pretty small and is more to the right to create my outlines for all the edges.
Then you have the option of placing a texture map with in this modifier. By default when you place it, it has a transparency, but if you turn off the alpha channel (I think that is what it was, you just have to find the right buttons)then the texture map will come out correctly and all is well.
I used this tut as a guide
http://www.bluesfear.com/tutorials/3Dcellshading.php
Here is the outcome.
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In the end I was just following the drawing to best I could and used the colors given to me on the concept art image to create my difference of colors
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Side note: images are posted on my gallery now
http://lear85.deviantart.com/gallery/