Good start!
I agree with the comments about the head. Also, she looks rather stiff from the side. The legs are nice, but as DerDude suggested, you may want to reduce some polys. Then you can use them else where to help shape the head.
Thanks everyone...I actually caught many of the things you all suggested right after I posted the earlier ones...I would still like to et more out of the mesh, but I'm so slow, that I might not have enough time to work with the maps...I also laid out and sewed the uvmap...still have some wasted space. I was tring to have more to work with on the head and torso and not so much on the arms and legs...crits welcome...thanks for looking.
I saw how a map only had to show half the mesh if the opposite side was identical...which got me realizing that there was a way to mirror the textures..(even though I don't know how to do it yet...lol) so I redid the map..I hope this also solves my problem with the pixels being to washy..I'm betting that my color choices were to heavily blended for a toon that only measures an inch and a half high...paint tomorrow...I did my best to lay the uv's out, but there is still wasted area..oh well...next time...
You have to cut up your UVs differently. You have seams everywhere now and still a lot of wasted space.
Detach the arms from the torso and the hands from the arms. Detach the legs from the torso and the feet from the legs.
Stitch together all the arm pieces so that there is only a seam on the underside of the arm. For the arms you'll have seams just like on clothing: a seam all around the shoulder where the sleeve joins the torso part, and a seam on the underside of the arm where you don't notice it as much.
Map the top of the hands planar and the bottom as well. Join these two pieces together along the back of the hand and pinky finger. This is basically how the seams are on mitten gloves.
Stitch together all the leg pieces so there is only a seam on the inside of the leg, like the inseam of pants.
The feet tend to be a bit trickier, you'll have to find out what works, but be sure to join up the pieces as much as possible. You can unwrap them from the sides and join them up at the heel, but that may cause too much stretching at the top of the feet. In that case, unwrap the top of the feet separately and then join them up with one of the side pieces so to at least eliminate one seam on top of the feet. Select the bottoms of the feet separately and planar map them.
Generally speaking, having some distortion is better than seams all over the place. Look at clothing to give you ideas where to put the seams. Also, look at other people's flat textures to see how they laid out the UVs. You already did this for the mirroring, but not for the shapes that the UV chunks should have.
Thank you very much for that...I'll never finish this project by the 16th, but it helps a lot as this is the next area of my learning curve...I also found that I was able to adjust my settings on the file and placement nodes to get a clearer picture, but still not what I see Mop and some others getting. I'm running a Nvidia 5500 fx card.
lol I wouldn't aspire to get the same quality as Mop just yet Mop is a pro and a lot of the clarity that comes out in his renders is from the texture itself. Work on your uv layout, look for some tutorials on pelt mapping and the relax dialogue. It looks to me like you have just planar mapped the model in sections.
lol...thanks you two...I'll continue to work on it...it's certainly not the same painting digitally as painting with oils...I was beginning to consider hand painting and scanning it in...:)
It helps a lot to paint in your base colors first. I usually use the select and fill tools for this. Once you have your base layed out then begin painting your details in pixil by pixil in layers. I use up to 10 layers for a texture so I can fade or enhance aspects to get the best result. Paint in your main details like eyes, lips and pretty much anything not too close together on one layer then make a new layer and continue adding detail. By keeping parts seperate on seperate layers it makes it easier to go back and fix just one element without having to repaint surrounding areas. Digital painting is far easier than oils or other paper mediums it just takes a bit of getting used to
Replies
Good luck.
I agree with the comments about the head. Also, she looks rather stiff from the side. The legs are nice, but as DerDude suggested, you may want to reduce some polys. Then you can use them else where to help shape the head.
Detach the arms from the torso and the hands from the arms. Detach the legs from the torso and the feet from the legs.
Stitch together all the arm pieces so that there is only a seam on the underside of the arm. For the arms you'll have seams just like on clothing: a seam all around the shoulder where the sleeve joins the torso part, and a seam on the underside of the arm where you don't notice it as much.
Map the top of the hands planar and the bottom as well. Join these two pieces together along the back of the hand and pinky finger. This is basically how the seams are on mitten gloves.
Stitch together all the leg pieces so there is only a seam on the inside of the leg, like the inseam of pants.
The feet tend to be a bit trickier, you'll have to find out what works, but be sure to join up the pieces as much as possible. You can unwrap them from the sides and join them up at the heel, but that may cause too much stretching at the top of the feet. In that case, unwrap the top of the feet separately and then join them up with one of the side pieces so to at least eliminate one seam on top of the feet. Select the bottoms of the feet separately and planar map them.
Generally speaking, having some distortion is better than seams all over the place. Look at clothing to give you ideas where to put the seams. Also, look at other people's flat textures to see how they laid out the UVs. You already did this for the mirroring, but not for the shapes that the UV chunks should have.
Good luck.
Part of the reason MoP's textures look so crisp though is that he kicks ass at painting textures.
Edit: Xaltar beat me to it.
Good luck with it.