Living In Colour!

Well today turned to be pretty good. I ran into a few problems earlier on as I came in this morning but I managed to get around it. The problems were consisting of the typology of the shell. When it came to flattening out the image it kepf messing up, but also I could tell that when it did flatten, the head was modelled all that symmetrically...at least I don't think so. Another thing that I noticed was the fact that there were two pieces of my head typology as I selected and viewed it in the Texture editor. After looking at the UV points I realised that one part represented the back of the head the otherwas the front and side of it. So when it came to sewing the uvs together it messed up. After trying again and again I started paying attention to the highlighted texture borders, which are think lines in the typology. My theory is this, instead of haiving one solid line from the back of the head and to the front, I had two others on either side of the head. I could see the shape that the thick lines created when I unfolded the back of the texture. So to remedy this I deleted those lines on either side, but to no avail. So I followed the book as closely as possibled and Idecide to cut the middle line from back to front. There was nothing I could do about the back of the head since I simply had no clue on how to fix it, beside the hair would be covering the back anyways. Lastly to test it I added a checker texture to the moddle to see how it would look, the squres looked a lot better than before.

Next came the colouring, which wasn't bad to tell the truth this was when things were starting to get better slightly. There were two methods of colouring, one was taking the UV into Photoshop and colour it but I think due to the crappiness of the PC, it gave me a message saying "invalid name". So another way was saving it as a "TIFF" and opening paint to get it in, but even then I could only save in certain places. I decided to stick to the model as close as possible, obviously but the skin looked kinda dull and I didn't want that for the hair, so my friend Lewis suggested adding a blin texture to it aswell as the eyes. It worked wonders. The couloring of the body wasn't difficult but the skirt was something I wanted to make stand out. I wanted it to have a certain texture to it so I made texture in photoshop and tried to upload it in maya....surprise, surprise it didn't work, but thank God for Alex and Dand Edgely for helping me fix that. They also suggested a bump map on the texture to hepl it stand out. In the render view the skirt looked a bit flat still so I added some creases and folds in it to make it more 3D-ish, and the result is what I've posted.

I'm thinking of adding an occlusion on this just to try and make it look like eye candy as much as possible. I just hope that tomorrow will be as successful as it was today, so stay tuned.