In terms of UV mapping, we were introduced to some different techniques that I had not used before.
I expanded my understanding of marking the seams works by following the exercise, as well as learning that I don’t need to use a set up a UV project modifier for this and that you can simply set it up with nodes.
Additionally, in class we were taught about the UDIM workflow, which I did end up utilising on my character. Using multiple tiles for texturing rather than just one makes your textures higher quality as each part of your model is getting a higher texture density than it would if it was all packed into one tile.
I added a mirror modifier to my character because as I was marking the seams I would run issue little topology issues that I would want to tweak and this just made things a little easier.
I originally made the seam on the bottom here like on the practice water dragon, but I put it on the top instead to reduce distortion since I want the bottom to be seen in my scene.
Plus, that distortion wouldn’t really be seen as much along the thin back fins.
I think that the way I approached marking the seams for UVing this year was overall a lot cleaner than the way I would have approached it last year. The majority of my textures ended up working really well and I’m really happy about my improvement in that regard.
I also included a seam along the edges where I wanted the belly to be glowing, as it would later speed up my texturing process.
I ended up getting rid of the seams around the eyes because I felt it just caused unnecessary texture distortion, and in hindsight I think I probably could have gotten rid of the seams around the nostrils as well.
I decided to just have two tiles for my character, but even that alone helped me get a lot more detail in my textures later on.
I went with this sort of layout for now. For some reason I thought that I wasn’t supposed to rotate the textures, so I wasn’t necessarily getting as much detail as I wanted at first, but I fixed this later.
So I moved on to texturing for now.
I imported the retopoed model first, then unticked “use low poly mesh as high poly mesh” and imported the subdivided version of my model to bake on top.
Now for my character I needed to look up how to do two major things: create emission for the glow, and transparency for the jelly.
I followed this tutorial in order to get the glowing effect:
And this tutorial to create the jelly effect:
And it was working really well!
And here I ran into the issue of the textures being a little too pixellated for my liking.
I had to go back to my UV Maps and enable rotation so that the body, fins and back could take up more UV space.
It was still being just a tad pixelly, but miles better.
But the face was still being a little too pixellated for me. I averaged the scale of the textures but I decided that maybe I should make a few things bigger, especially since I still had so much unused UV space on my maps.
So I made some things way bigger to hopefully solve the pixellation issue.
But I had this weird texturing issue on the nostrils, and I spent maybe too much time on trying to fix it.
At first I thought maybe it was because I accidentally didn’t mirror the seams perfectly with the nostrils.
And then I thought that maybe it was just a retopology issue.
I also tried to bring the nostril in more to hopefully even just hide the issue, but…
I ended up really not liking how this looked.
So I decided to just keep it the same as before and just changed the retopology, and made the seam just a simple loop.
I also thought for some reason that I needed to subdivide the eye for the high resolution version of my model…
It wasn’t letting me symmetrise my model at this point, and I thought it was because I had changed the retopology.
But I deleted half the faces and reapplied the mirror modifier and then…
I still wasn’t able to symmetrise for some reason.
And for some reason this process had deleted my unwrapping so I had to go in and do it again.
… I didn’t realise I only had half of the UV maps at the time.
And I realised that the reason that subdivide wasn’t working earlier was because I had subdivision turned on in my multires modifier.
But I was definitely happier with how the nostrils were unwrapped now.
But somehow, the texturing problem had gotten worse??
So I tried one more thing – trying to make the UVs for the nostrils smaller.
But the problem was still there, just in lower quality. I figured this may just be some sort of substance painter issue, as the nostrils looked fine until I baked the maps.
At least this time I was actually able to paint on top of it.
When baking my character (I had to redo it a few times due to all these issues…) I also decided to select “height” and “opacity” since I wanted the height texture for the scales and opacity settings for the jelly.
Anddd I was having the texture issue again…. I decided to just cut my losses and leave it for now.
At least having to restart my texturing process so many times allowed me to experiment and change things, as well as learn how to add emission and opacity from memory.
At first I made the jelly part of my model white to more easily distinguish between the jelly and non-jelly parts as I completed the texturing.
I also noticed that my textures were mirroring for… some reason… (it was the UV maps).
And there was some weird stuff going on with the eyes, too…
I decided to change the seams and move them to the back.
I also … forgot to account for the fact that with the transparency, you could technically see into the model from this angle. But thankfully, it wouldn’t be an issue in my scene.
Overall I was pretty happy with this so far!
The eye texture was still being a little odd, but I wasn’t sure how to fix it so I left it.
And there were still some weird texturing things going on…
The teeth weren’t looking ideal but thankfully they later looked alright from a distance.
And here’s where the weird ear retopology came back to bite me… the texturing was being very annoying here.
I used this alpha painting on the model for that painterly-ish look to match the reference sheet that I had made.
… or at least I tried to until I finally realised that the reason why my textures were automatically mirroring this whole time, which I had chalked up to a substance painter issue, was actually because I only had half of my maps for almost each thing.
So I went in and redid the UV mapping again ….
At least at this point I knew what I was doing.
A few hours later…
I was finally able to make some good progress, and I liked how things were looking. I did add some height to convey the scales, though I later noticed that close up, there were these weird indents, probably because of the brush I had used or something like that. Thankfully this wasn’t that big of an issue.
As I kept adding layers I was slowly really liking how it was coming together!
Something that was still frustrating was this on the fins, as the mirror line was going right through them and they were thin enough that from a distance, they were just red. I’m glad I could at least texture them when zoomed in.
Looking back at this texture, I’m wondering whether I would have added so many spots along the back, although when I tried to take them away the character looked a bit bare. I think I would have also made the base colour of the back fins a little darker, as it came across a little differently on my model than it did in 3D. I think I also lost a little bit of the darker tones in the body of my character that I could have added back in.
However, all things considered, I did really like how my character was looking so far and it was fun working on these textures!
Also, here are some higher quality photos that I took from Substance Painter (hence the environment):
As one last part to this blog I just wanted to show the UV unwrapping and texturing process for the fish models too. The textures later ended up not working very well in unreal due to me mapping things out wrong, but I wanted to show what my process was anyway.
At first I approached the seam to the tail in the wrong way so the textures were stretching.
A seam that went all around the tail ended up working far better.
And finally, here’s my texturing for the fish! Admittedly it was a little bit rushed, however I do think it looks decent and it’s a shame it didn’t end up working later on.