Face Texturing tut vids.

A Must See. yeah so its a dodgy method, but damn he's good.

Projection texturing (part 1) from Slipgatecentral on Vimeo.

Projection texturing (part 2) from Slipgatecentral on Vimeo.

Concept Development Steps.

Images on this post were taken from Deviantart, member dustsplat. as development and layout examples.

Characters.

Step 1. Thumbs/silhouettes. (below)
Step 2. loose sketches. (above)
Step 3. colour themes. (above)
Step 4. few colour concepts of your final idea's. (not just one)
Step 5. ortho's. We need to know what the back looks like don't we?


Environments. (same again really)

Step 1. Thumbs/silhouettes.(don't forget to think about assets)

Step 2. loose sketches/Composition's. (Remember your supposed to have a character in there)

Step 3. colour themes.
Step 4. few colour concepts of your final idea's. (not just one)

Step 5. a nice final full render of the area you wish to make. (don't forget our environments will have edges.

best way to do all steps apart from your lovely colour concepts. is to keep it simple stick to black and white. or even just line art. no wasting time on lovely drawings early on. sorry forgot the name of the guy who did these.

The HUGE....To Do List.

Phill.

• Completely Finnish bobby
• Concept clothing and environment
• Mystic concepting
• Ringmaster concepting
• Male arm base mesh
• Facial rigging research – bobby test head
• How to re-use for multiple faces
• 3ds Max lighting research
• Character lighting rig with moving camera
• Environment lighting rig
• Sun movement – dawn dusk

Bex

• Completely Finnish Emm's.
• Show girl concepting
• Strong man concepting
• Presentation border
• Ideas overview. (art style)
• Patterns guidelines.
• Blog background

Other characters to concept. do concepts of front and back.

• Ringmaster.
• Strong man.
• Show girl.
• Mystic.
• (can add more l8er when these are finalized)

Environments. (a few ideas for each character)

ideas so far. feel free to add the more the better.

• the mystics. end of the world wagon.
• the mystics. ticket booth.
• show girl. dressing room. (children peeping)
• anyone. odd corner with circus poster behind.
• Anyone. old school b&w photo backdrop. sooo with curtains.
• lighting. ideas.
• Anyone. Sitting on chest/box with tent backdrop
• Clown stilts/other clown long poster

Stuff to save time l8er.

• Base mesh
• Female – Arm (Bex says done)
• Female – Leg
• Male – Arm
• Male – Leg (Phill says done)
• make all textures tileable. (and find lots to)
• have a inside of the mouth ready and uv'd for quick adding.(Phill says Done.)

Stuff for the blog and organizing.

• How were gona do normals. (not that we know yet)
• timeline
• Asset list
• Composition overview - including presentation - eye rules etc

stuff bex needs to Finnish

• Ideas overview. (art style)
• patterns guidelines.
• Blog background

OTT IDEAS Research

• How to make a funki mirror in max.
• do we want to make are own circus posters and tickets.
• Face rigs?
• Myst style scroll around.
• do we want moving gifs in the presentaton. (if so what things we doing.) =

moving lighting.
fake 3d pan around.
Smoking a fag. ? ooo smokeeee.
Breathing.
Wind blowing.
Dancing. (who knows)
Im sure there is a slide effect for making it look like a book turning pages.
tf2 blog style progression video
presentation developement

Art Style notes and ideas.

In the eyes of the project white is no longer white, and black is no longer black. (not that you should ever be using pure black or pure white anyway :P ) try aiming for more yellow / brown tones. We want things to look worn old and used. rather than new and dirty.

Framing the character with the environment is a must, we don't want every thing to blur into one big blob when looking at it from a distance. If the character has dark clothing, a light bright background or spot light will help make them pop (same as light clothing should have a dark background), take any of the pictures from Coraline as an example.

Also the nice earthy but bright colours in coraline is what we are aiming for in costumes and assets.

Images below are character models by http://www.vamak-graphics.com/

We hope to have a similar style of diffuse texture, as outfits may be complex we would like to keep normals to a minimum, keeping the detail sharp and clean.

We will hopefully use zbrush high poly's for creases and small clothing details. But instead of using them for normals, we will bake ambient occlusions so that we have a more hands on delicate approach to detail.

Keep differant items of clothing to differant photoshop layers, so it's easier to test out different colour schemes.

This is a must if we are having people in the same outfits, e.g a line of show girls, as small differences will go a long way. We don't want a line of clones with differant hair cuts.

Phil topology poop

Project Brief

Aim –

We will be doing 2 Character + Environment sets each, with an additional Character + Environment shared between the two of us.

To make a variety of characters and a mini environment that will be designed to function as a scene or stage.

We plan to have a range of imagery that depicts both the working life and behind the scenes that the general public would not view.

A vintage photo session set will also be produced for the individual character renders.

Our angle on texturing is the idea of Worn opposed to Grime.

Although we are going to adhere to Game Art specifications our aim is to make art that isn’t technically classed as just Game Art. To make scenes which are appealing to all genres of art and avoid that Game Art Cliché.


Characters –

The characters will be based around the Circus and will be set between 1870 and 1950.
We plan to avoid some of the usual Circus cliché’s by taking a more personal approach to the characters.

The characters will be visually realistic with only minor characterisation, their costume will be heavily characterised to their role within the Circus.

Technically they will not be dependent on normals to show form, we will be using any sculpted areas to produce an ambient occlusion and have the majority of detail diffuse texture based, with only mild normals to differentiate between materials.


Environments –

The environments will be used more like a stage/scene as opposed to a playable area.
We plan to design these scenes so that they interlink, and don’t just appear as separate entities.

We will create a few different camera shots with each scene as well as having a vintage photo session built for separate character renders.

The scenes will act as a backdrop of sorts that depict elements about the character, they will be fairly simple in design but with a good amount of time put into texturing to give depth and atmosphere.

Skin tone. Help.

Here are some useful "cheat Sheets" to help with skin colour, tones and were to put them.
Remember not all people have the same skin tone, your pallet does not need to vary much at all to create a different look. Skin tone tut.

• If you struggle for a base tone to work from, how about looking at some makeup foundation swatches, useful things indeed.
  

Beca's Edge Loop find's

Please note: some of these are all fairly high poly ref's, use for mesh flow guides only.

Resources.

Image reference. =

http://www.flickr.com/ (god of all image sites. and yes better than google)
The Circus, 1870-1950. (book)
http://www.circusmuseum.nl/eng/. (old circus posters of oddness)

Model/Edge loop Reference. =

beca's finds. (random assortment of edge loop finds)
Topology. (losts and lost of head topology ref's)
The-Bluprints.com. (blueprints of everything apart from what you need. damn site)
Phil topology poop

Anatomy reference. =
REAL bodys. (you have been warned)

Artnatomy. (teaching and learning of the anatomical and biomechanical foundation of facial expression morphology.) yea what they said. :P
Faces of meth. (eye bags, black eye's and face gore.)
Face of Sydney. (general face shape.)
Posemaniacs.com. (full body and muscle ref)
Rey Bustos. (studies of muscles over photos.)

Tutorial's. =

Human skin texture. (CLEAN skin texture tut, good for a base.)
Model Texturing. by silpgate. (well worth a watch)
Folds part 1._part 2. (old. folds drawing tut)
Mandi's Biped tut. (don't 4get heathers on b.board)
Old man. (fast easy way of colouring your doodles)
Varga Hair tut. (a few diff ways of doing hair and there alpha's)

Nick Zuccarello tutorials

Modeling Guidelines.

Guidelines and reminders for your Modeling needs...

• Ensure all verts are welded.
• Intersecting model pieces are allowed but only for small parts which will not compromise rigging.
• ALWAYS reset the xform to 0.0.0. and collapse before finishing. (see Asset completion checklist)
• Don't model in to much detail, a lot can be textured in. (representational amount of detail)
• Box assets and assets with harsh shapes should have a bevelled edges, as it makes them shade better and improves quality.
  
• Assets and characters must be modelled to a real world scale.
  
• Characters must have inside their mouths modelled and textured. (including teeth)
• 
  

Reminders. (things i forget)

• 
  

Texturing Guidlines.

Guidlines and reminders for your texturing needs...

• Textures should be shared where appropriate. E.g doors should NOT all be textured separately. overlaying is gold
• Using black for shadows is Evil and punishable by death :p
• A combination of real world textures and photoshop methods should be used when creating textures. NO over the top grime overlays.
  
• When texturing work at a larger scale to improve clarity. Sizing it down at a later date. (1024 to a 512 and so on)
• Make sure all textures adhere to the naming conventions.
• There should be no light information or reflections in the diffuse. Textures that tile Should have all obvious grime repeats removed.
  
• "repeat after me the holy mantra of jolyon webb - skin is not pink, grass is not green, sky is not blue, metal is not grey"
  

Reminders. (things i forget)

• Flat normals colour = RGB 128 128 255
•