Guess what we’ve been doing this week?
So we started with learning how you unwrap a 3D model to make it into a 2D image, so that we can actually draw on it. This is easier said that done, especially with round or very complex shapes. This is what my model looked like after a lot of work.
The colored squares and the numbers are part of the UV checker, which is an image you lay on top of your model to check for distortion. When I first put an UV checker on top of my model the image was completely distorted and I had to unwrap and relax the individual bits of the model a lot to make it look like it does in the image above!
Afterwards we used this to create a UV map for our model, which is essentially our 3D model flattened into 2D, and this is what mine looks like:
You can tell pretty easily what the different parts are. The two shorter legs are overlapped at the top, and underneath that you have the triangular sides, and so on. The next step is to paint on top of this to give the model the actual color and texture we want it to have.
This is still a work in progress, because I’m far from pleased. I’ve used a wood texture I found online and painted over it to give it some more details. It looks alright when applied to the model, but not great. I think I’ll show what it looks like when it’s completely done, so hopefully next weekend. We also need to make three other maps; a normal map, a specular map and a roughness map. The normal map adds more details to the model without increasing the polycount, the specular map is how shiny the object is and the roughness map is exactly what it sounds like! I’ll talk more about those next week too, I think.
I also remade Pumpkin Boy a bit to make him more suited for 3D modeling and I like him a lot better now.
He looks more like a kid now and I think it would be easier to make more characters in this style. I have a couple of ideas for more characters from this game! I might draw or model them in the future. I’m still working on an action pose for Pumpkin Boy, and a character background sheet.
Tova Svensson 