UV and Texturing
29/04/24
Now that retopology was finally done, I could get to UV and texturing. Initially, I wanted to do UV in Maya as I knew how to do it better there but when I tried to import it into Maya,
The normals were reversed, so I tried to reverse it, It worked for a few pieces, but most of the other parts couldn’t be changed no matter what I did, so I had to bring it back into Blender. It ended up being so much easier to reverse it in blender and I fixed it in no time.
At this point, I just really wanted to start texturing so I decided to stay in Blender to do my UV since it was quite simple, I just used smart UV wrap for all the different parts and adjusted the size and placement if needed.
Now I could get started on texturing. I started off with a marble smart material on the face since I wanted a glass porcelain look and then I added a skin material on top of it just to get that little texture in.
I really wanted the BJD doll look with the blush around the cheeks, eyes and lips, so I got started with a dirt brush and made sure the opacity was low. For the eyes, I used a soft brush for the eye and layered different colours on, blue, green and black for the pupil.
I applied the skin colour to the rest of the body
Using the dirt brush again, I added the blue eye shadow, referencing the spring couture 2024 looks. I wanted to add the thin eyebrows in as well, I tried using different brushes but nothing looked right so I gave up on it.
I felt that having a bloody/creepy doll would be better for the character instead so I also added some dirt/blood stains on the edges of the connecting parts and then some cracks on the face. I wanted her to look broken and on the verge of losing her sanity.
When looking around the brushes, I found the stitches brush, which I really liked. I asked my group members what they thought of the stitches and they both liked them, so I kept them on.
To match the blue patterns on the other character, I drew some patterns on my character as well. I wanted the pattern to be more of a growth so I didn’t put too much on the body. I liked the 3D-lifted look of it so I made sure to add more height when drawing the patterns on.
For the stitches, I used two types of meat materials to give it a raw look, With a black mask, I painted the area I wanted it to cover and used the dirt brush on low opacity to smudge out the outline. Using the dirt brush again, I added blood to the stitches directly using a dark red and then ground sand material.
I copied and pasted the four layers on the different body parts and repainted the masks in the right areas. and then added the blue patterns on all the joints.
For the joints, I added the patterns on as well to try and match my group member and then covered it up with the same four layers with the meat and sand materials.
I added more cracks with the crack brush on the body with the height lowered and on the right eye; I felt this would give it a more damaged look, I also drew a tear on the left, I wanted to to show that she’s still alive but is slowly being corrupted inside.
I ended up adding some blood stains around the eyes and mouth to give that extra horror effect
I added in some stockings as the human form had stockings on so I tried to see how it would look. I was a bit on the fence about it. I tried to blend it in a bit more by adding ripps and holes but it still didn’t feel right so I removed it.
I really liked how she looked, I changed the theme halfway through the pprocess, which I was a bit hesitant about but I think it was for the best.