BodyPaint 2 - Character Texturing By Sebastien Florand aka Fluffy BodyPaint 2 - Unfold and paint a map for a character.
my fantasy squirrel characters so we can have a concrete example to apply these principles to.
- one under the feet - one at the bottom of the tail - one behind the ears
Hello guys and gals,
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Tutorial
This month I will introduce you to BodyPaint 2, some of its tools and principles. BodyPaint is the best UV editing tool on the market and shows its power and versatility as soon as you put your fingers on it. It allows you to unfold the UVW coordinates of your model to be able to paint on it seamlessly and without deformation afterward. UVW’s allows also to be deformed with the model, when itself is deformed. That behavior can't be applied to other types of projections, since they will use a fixed set of coordinates to project on the model. What is UVW? UVW is a specific set of coordinates that is allocated to the texture area. They define the direction of the texture, based on their own axis compared to the object's axis. U and V are used instead of the X and Y axis terms to avoid confusion for the program, and the W axis is only used for procedural shaders that need a coordinate to be applied in volume over the object (for example, the Wood texture make use of the W axis, a little bit like a depth value). "Regular" textures, like a color map painted by hand, will only use the U and V coordinates, as they only use a set of 2D information's, since the texture is flat. So, in light of this, I will more often use the term UVs to define the texture coordinates during this tutorial, since I only plan to use those. 1 - Think ahead The first thing is to model a character. For this tutorial, I will use one of
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One of the things that will dictate if a mapping is good or bad, are the seams. Seams are areas of the texture that can't be linked together on a flat area, but that are in the object in volume. Since the borders of the textures won't be linked together, it can be tricky to paint by hand a completely seamless texture without painting too much on one side compared to the other. So, seams need to be in a place where we won't notice them much, in case we screw up our manual paint. BodyPaint has a few neat tools to avoid messing up our paint job for these seams anyway, but good planning is always better in any case. For my squirrel, I will place my seams as follows, along the polygons of my mesh : - one seam along the spine - one along the arms and palms of the hands
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Try to model a clean mesh, without too stretched polygons, or non-planar polygons, and without overcrowding some areas, since it will affect the quality of your unfolding and the time you spend on it (more polygons = more things to adjust and tweak). Since I will use one of BodyPaint's features known as interactive mapping, this tool works with polygon selections, so you will need to picture in your head how you want to unfold your UVs and point out your polygons selections. Here is are the selection sets I plan to unfold (one color for each, here) [pic3]:
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It is a good idea to prepare and record your selection sets, so you can hide them easily later on when tweaking the unfolded mesh. 2 - Create a UVW set
