UVs Part One

Here is where I began to run into issues. I’m not sure what I did wrong at this stage, but it may have been that I marked the seams before projecting the UVs on to the plane I created behind my model, which I will elaborate on later. I wasn’t sure if I had to join her parts before or after unwrapping, so I made two saves so if joining her was a mistake I could go back to the other save, joined her parts, and then began unwrapping. Things got confusing at this stage. I had two versions of the UV map somehow, so I worked on one, got it to a stage where I was happy with the layout, there was no overlapping, and exported it to Adobe 3D Substance Painter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Substance Painter Part One

This is where the issues come in. When I applied a texture to one part of my model, it applied to another part which shouldn’t have been connected. The dress was somehow also affecting the hands, the hair was affecting the face, and the legs were affecting the buttons. Something was not right about the UV map. I messaged Mike, who suggested there might be an overlap in my UV, but I checked and couldn’t see any. I messed around with them for a while, but nothing worked. I completely removed and redid the seams, I tried projecting the UVs on to a plane again, I tried messing around with some settings but nothing worked, so I scrapped it. I reloaded an earlier save.

 

UVs Part Two

I went back to the save before I started the UV process, which sadly meant some of the extra things I had built were lost. I had to remake the belt, buttons and prop, although by this point I was pretty anxious the texturing would go wrong in this save too, so I didn’t want to put in loads of time remaking these extra features just to lose them again. I remade the horse crop and then projected the UVs, marked the seams and unwrapped. This time, it looked how it was supposed to. Success! I unwrapped the UVs for the character and the prop separately, and exported them to start texturing!

(Note- When I did the UVs at this time she was not already posed, these screenshots of her updated seams are simply from her finished model, as I did not take any photos from earlier in the process.)

 

Substance Painter Part Two

The textures worked absolutely fine for her now. I worked on her model first, spending ages picking the colours that I wanted and adjusting the normals. When I was happy with her, I exported her new appearance back into blender, and started on the prop!

With her and her prop done, I posed her, and went to export her. I watched the video on Blackboard on how to do this, and that’s when I heard it. In the video, it was explained that to export to Sketchfab, I needed one material. I had two as I textured my character and prop separately.

I tried to find a way to easily combine the two into one material, but there was none. I just decided to bite the bullet, so I joined the two objects, deleted both materials, created a new blank one, unwrapped her again and went back into substance painter.

 

Substance Painter Part Three

I had retextured about half of the model when the program crashed. I hadn’t saved as this had never happened to me before. I had lost my progress yet again! By this point I was numb to it and was simply determined to just get the model done. I restarted, saving after almost everything I did, and after another few hours, it was done. Both her and her horse crop this time!

I exported and moved the final textures to blender, and as I had posed her before, this meant I was done. The end was in sight!