Unit 7: Narrative - Charles - Pipeline/UV Layout & Final Render

Hello Everyone,

Here I come with another little update on Smoke Stack Studios "Ashen Bloom" animated short. With Pre-viz somewhat finalised and the scenes being lacquered with polish I decided to take some time away from my rigging spree just to post up my texture development of "Charles" our special little star. Its been a long journey with lots of mapping tweaks and even though I didn't get it completely right I think it works and is more neatly laid out then I thought originally.

I have started looking into a few pages for our future art of book (not invested yet mind you) but the layout has been considered since we did the green light so I have some idea where this will go. I have created a number of light and texture passes on top of my UV layout textures all of which are present in this post. I ended up clipping them together instead of considering html coding I just thought I could design it better this way...

The image above shows my UV, 50/50 (Dif Opac + UV) Standard Diffuse, and Normal. The normals will probably be a little hard to see because I had to mute most of them because the edges of some of my shapes were waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too strong. There is also a rather annoying little bit of stretching on the jacket (something I didn't notice when painting DOH). Still I'm glad the UV Layout looks pretty neat which is a great thing to understand now (it really bugged me for Agebook). Now I can do my fussy thing with UVs by laying them out neatly lol...

Next I performed a few render passes just to have something of a pipeline for Charles himself. The silhouette pass I thought was a pretty cool thing to have here especially considering our discussions with Justin so I thought it couldn't hurt to appreciate Charles looking unique in silhouette. The basic pass is just using a lambert shader with lighting, added the normals and occlusion had their own individual importance. Again if you cannot see the normals you will have to look close I had to mute them because they were coming out too strong.

Last but not least came the diffuse/normal with lighting pass I decided to place the UV layout across the entire model to showcase the placement of seems etc. I felt this added a little something to the completion of this post. I felt as though there were a few boxes to be checked in this department and seeing as clients love to see the ins and outs of their commissions. I'd like to think they'd get a kick out of seeing what the character is besides a load of polygons.

To conclude I decided to post up the tag for our animated short, I will probably be using this throughout our entire art of it just works. I will probably have to ask Lydia to give me a background less version of the flower. Things are getting a little tiresome screening this flower over the top of textures etc. Anyway onwards and upwards from here I am going back to rigging as soon as this post is done and dusted.

Hope everyone is having fun out there, we will have to see what Alan thinks of our progress now at tomorrows tutorials (our second to last). Hope it all goes well and I hope this development will clear the need for more texture development the time is here to get down to ANIMATION!!

Catcha ladle!

Over & Out,
xXStItChXx