tattoo's on characters
polycounter lvl 14
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
your thoughts are much appriciated
Replies
The only thing that ever matters in this industry is results.
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.
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
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.
Completely, totally and 100% agree with this. :poly121:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.