Open Sourcing

esterday was a snow day! We had a hefty 8 inches here in Wilmington, so I had plenty of time for some blendering and painting with the tablet.

The first update is an updated Cephy model. I remade the body using a much cleaner, low poly mesh. It should deform very well while animating and should render fairly quick as well. The last thing to finish up on the model is the mouth and eye/eyelids.

The next thing that I took on this past weekend was to try my hand out at some texturing (see picture on left, please click for bigger image). I used just the hand off of the Cephy model and painted out a normal map and color map in Gimp. UV unwrapping the hand mesh was fairly straight forward, so I'll skip that step. I first painted in the wrinkles around the knuckles (the tablet made this a lot easier than it would have been!) and then added a black and white image of leather to add the pores. This completed my normal and specular map.

The next step was a color map. I mainly just painted flat colors out for a color map, but I also added a colorized picture of a piece of old bark to give it some detail. The palm didn't come out as well as the back of the hand, but I think that's mainly because I'm still learning how to paint wrinkles. It's not as easy as it seems!

I also got a chance to practice some painting yesterday. The image below is my attempt at doing some digital painting. I'm learning a lot with the new tablet and I'm definitely improving from the first car painting. This painting took about an hour and is based on the techniques from ImagineFX.