tattoo's on characters

seth.

hey folks, I am in the process of laying down some tattoo's on a character that I'm working on and after much thought I have come to the conclusion that not drawing them myself would somehow be cheating, and although it will add countless hours to the project I think that its the right thing to do for portfolio work....wadayarecon? is this the correct way to go about things....will anyone other than me even give a toss that all the tats are hand drawn etc....

your thoughts are much appriciated

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jmt

Tough question. The only tattoo I've done on a character was very simple. I'd usually recommend doing it yourself. I suppose it depends on the amount of time you have. How complex a tattoo are you planning on doing? You could heavily base it on an existing design (trace over some parts, change other parts), while not actually copying and pasting. On the other hand, in a video game company, it won't matter whether or not it was hand drawn as long as the result is solid and time efficient.

JacqueChoi

Nobody cares how its done. Trace it, draw it, photo-ref it. Doesnt matter.


The only thing that ever matters in this industry is results.

Kwramm

what Jacque said. Doesn't matter how you end up with the tattoo. Except when you photo-source it, be careful with copyright / personal rights. People may object when you put personal things like their faces or tattoos in your game, so you have to change it to a degree.

Steve Schulze

Tattoo artists do get very upset if you rip of their art though. It's plagiarism as much as taking a chunk of someone else's texture map and slapping it on your own. Except that most game developers aren't giant bikey dudes who could crush your head in one massive meaty hand if you were to upset them.

chrisradsby

Jackablade wrote: »

Except that most game developers aren't giant bikey dudes who could crush your head in one massive meaty hand if you were to upset them.

That's not even a proper stereotype xD Most tattoo artist I know are just regular people that like dressing alternatively* Heck my girlfriend is aiming to be a tattoo artist, but yeah she could totally crush my head.

Either way, do only very generic things or ask permission to use tattoos. Maybe check deviantart for tattoo design and ask the creators there.

seth.

I think that if this were a production piece then I would totally follow the quickest route while staying within the bounds of legality I just dont want someone looking through my folio and saying " oh nice texture especially the tat's" when my only reply could be " yeah thanks, I cut and paste like a demon "

on the subject of build, we have a couple of scary big bastards at work, I think that they are programmers rather than artists, but I'm too scared to ask them

Rick Stirling

There are hundreds, nay thousands of free, royalty free designs out there that you can use.



Authoring tattoos without experience is really hard apart from the simple ones. I did all the tattoos for the male and female multiplayer characters in The Lost and Damned, where the tattoos started off as a few random designs and evolved into a full sleeve as you ranked up. Wwe had a small bank of designs to help, so about half of the individual constituent tattoos were there, but that was still very difficult.

glynnsmith

I think we all know the only way to do this is to tattoo yourself and photosource it.

A-N-P

glynnsmith wrote: »

I think we all know the only way to do this is to tattoo yourself and photosource it.

Completely, totally and 100% agree with this. :poly121:

Ace-Angel

I'm pretty sure half of the time on your character, is going to spent trying to get that long dragon tattoo to wrap properly around your characters arm, seams and all.

Mark Dygert

Also consider how your character is going to deform and how that will effect the look of the tattoo. Lets say you put a dragon tattoo in a deforming area and suddenly your awesome tattoo transforms into a dolphin fucking a penguin... you're going to be yelled at.

I bring it up because there are times character artists work in a deformation void like the character is a static prop that will only ever float around in a T or A pose.

Gav

I did a bunch of tats for a sports game I worked on - sort of a mix of photo ref and hand painting. You'll be hard pressed to find photos of tattoos on people that aren't either someone's property or shitty reference. I'd say just visit some artists portfolios and learn their sensibilities (placement of key images, how they're connected, etc.)

Generally, for big pieces, tattoo artists will draw out an illustration, get approval, then break this illustration off into panels. After that, they'll lay out the panels on the human canvas in stencil form and finally trace the stencil with ink. After that, they'll go over the outlines again in a bolding pass and then finally use a shading needle to colour in chunks. Basically, I try to replicate that process - painting the tattoos flat, duplicated the area of the model that I wanted to ink up, unwrap that new model to fit the tattoo texture and projected it onto the original model. Which I found helped save a bunch of time that you'd spend projection painting or painting to fit an odd shape - and you get a reuseable bank of tattoo textures just in case.

Edit> Basically, to echo what Vig said - most tattoo artists consider the canvas they're working with. Like placing certain things on elbows (or even leaving them blank) taking advantage of bigger areas for focus pieces, like shoulders and forearms as well as twisting things around limbs, etc.

Ace-Angel

People should avoid the heavily deformable areas for fancy artwork, not because it's hard and they should be lazy, but because even in real-life, it doesn't look charming.

My brother has a tattoo on his shoulder, which is a black eagle. It just looks odd on the placing. He has another tattoo akin to that on his upper arm biceps, and they look actually cool.

So yeah, unless you're planning on creating a Poser model with sultry tattoos a la Suicide Girls, take care what you put where. Remember, not every body part of the human body needs to have detail on it for no reason, just like grime.

Daelus

dustinbrown wrote: »

True. It's also worth noting that an anagram of Character Artist is Cathartic Arrest.

ca·thar·tic [kuh-thahr-tik] evacuating the bowels; purgative.

ar·rest [uh-rest] an act of stopping or the state of being stopped

Bear that in mind when those tattoos are stretching all over the place. Stop defecating on everything, Character Artists. Do your job.

It's rare when a post will both enlighten me and make me want to take a shower. You, sir, have accomplished both with eloquence and poise. I shall carry your words of wisdom always.

Frump

Good thread, I am just about to start texturing a character with a large tattoo and was considering how to do it.

I was thinking I would try polypainting it, it's just a design, then baking the polypaint to my UVs in XNormal. The method you described, Gav, makes sense, I'll try it that way. Thanks for the protip.