Files:
I uv unwrapped after skinning my model which ended up causing an issue with random uv islands. Alec explained that this was the issue and told me in the future to select the mesh and delete non-deformed history which would solve the uv issue. I ended up splitting the trousers down the middle to allow for a higher resolution, however, the rest were my final uvs.
I had a few issues before I began texturing which started during my first blender animation tests Charli’s skin was importing extremely discoloured, looking as though there was an issue with the normals. This only occurred after I had to redo the finger skin weights. For whatever reason, going back to this file and reskinning the fingers solved the issue.
Later when importing Charli into blender, I noticed that the light was affecting her skin, top, bralette, eyelashes and shoes differently than the rest of her. After sending this issue to Alec, he told me to select these parts of her mesh in blender and go to edit mode, select mesh, then normal, average, and finally face area, which fixed the normals issue. After learning this fix, I feel as though this may have fixed the earlier issue I was having with her discoloured skin and will try this fix if I ever have an issue like that again.
When baking the high poly onto the low poly mesh, I encountered an issue with clipping and shadows on areas where the mesh was close to her skin. I had to bake each texture set separately which allowed me to change the max frontal distance as needed for each part of the mesh. I also made sure that the objects on both the low poly and high poly meshes were the same, which allowed me to bake individual meshes by mesh name, and changed the ambient occlusion self occlusion setting to only same mesh name.
Before:
After:
To add a bit of stress and anxiety to her appearance, I added deep lines below Charli’s eyes . Henry expressed a little uncertainty about this choice as he felt it aged Charli. However, Alec felt with the right textures these lines could add the right amount of anxiety. I kept this in mind when texturing Charli’s face as I wanted to emphasise her eye bags enough without aging her any further.
Every step of the way, I kept constant communication with Caity to make sure I was following her concept of Charli. I also followed YouTube tutorials which taught me to add a skin face smart material to her face and body, which added blush colours around her ears, eyes, mouth and nose and pore like details to her skin. I felt this smart material added too much colour to Charli’s skin as we wanted her to look very pale, so I changed the base colour of the smart material and lowered the opacity of the redness slightly. I also erased the pores around her body as I felt they were too intense on her chest and arms compared to her face.
Hair Experimentation:
I experimented using a dirt generator for contours on her face to help with the painterly look we were looking for, however, I felt it didn’t give the right painterly look I was going for as my main inspiration was the characters from arcane, so I decided to hand paint contours onto her cheeks, jaw and forehead. In the early contour stages, I used the rake brush to add details to her blush and contour, however, the more I textured the more out of place I felt those detailed looked, so I stuck with using an ink and a charcoal brush for these details on her face, ears and elbows. For the majority of my brushes, I stuck to the list Caity used in the studio interior to keep all the painterly textures as cohesive as possible.
In keeping with the arcane inspiration, I tested out smudged eyeliner looks on Charli as I felt that would both help with the tired look, as well as add to the slight 00s grunge style. I colour picked from Caity’s concept initially but felt that once I used the colours with my textures, the shading looked too warm and dark. I toned down and gave around her eyes a more orange tone which would complement her eye colour well.
Final Textures:
Assets Modelled:
