3D character : Update 5 (clothes and shoes textured)

I have finally done texturing to clothes and shoes of my 3d character. Here are few updates on that. Shoe was the most difficult and time consuming. Rearranging uv coordinates took almost a day! It was really difficult to find or put suitable shoe material. Besides color choice was not easy either, I had a lot of combos but finally I settled down with chocolate color theme, I used very mild light shade of chocolate color for body.

Cargo pant was not that difficult in terms of texture material. Though I had to play around a lot to find good texture and resize/tile to get the best out of sample cloth material. But jeans material are not difficult to find. But just the jeans material was too plain, so I thought of creating stitches. And initially I was reluctant because I thought it would take a real long time for me to figure out how to make stitches. I played a lot with photoshop brushes but I was not getting the realistic effect. Because there are 2 layers for stitches, 1 consists of actual thread line and second for the holes in the cloth (darker tone). And I needed 2 separate color shades for both the layers, thus a need for 2 separate brushes to make threads. I will write a tutorial on this some day. But this technique was really helpful further to create stitches.

For shoe I had a real tough time selecting materials and texture patterns. I had to tweak different patterns a great deal to achieve some good looking effect. Some patterns were multipurpose. If you change the size or orientation or contrast of pattern, it will look different and can be used for different purposes.

New mouse design

I created this mouse for a 3d battle in KirupaForum. I had designed some of the concept designs. My main concept was to give a good grip and easy and faster navigation. I replaced the mouse wheel by joy-stick to give more freedom for motion. Joy-stick can also act as middle mouse down, just like mouse wheel.

I had done a little survey on that forum to know what is the general grip to hold the mouse. And I found mixed responses in given 2 options:

• full palm resting on mouse body (so whole hand will move mouse around) and
• palm over mouse not fully in touch with the body (so mainly fingers and knuckle will be used to move mouse around).

My sketch has a bump on the rear side of the mouse. This was added considering that dent in the palm can rest on that bump better. This design can work very well for people who like to rest their whole palm on the mouse body. I have a bit different design of that part in my 3d model. I had considered this 3d model for people who like to hold mouse like second type mentioned above.

Side face close up

I had this rendered image of my 3d character's face from side view. I really like this render, so I retouched the image in Photoshop to add some color and effect.

3D character : Update 4 (texturing begins)

Well! A lot of things have been done after I posted my last render. At last modelling part is over (pheewuuu)! I have started texturing the model now. Initially I was reluctunt to start with any complex texturing, rather I wanted to apply simple shaders to the objects. But I thought to have a look at uvw unwrap feature. So I was just playing with that feature and started texturing tshirt. But initially working with uvw unwrap was a real brain burning session. I had no idea of how it works. I went through some tutorials and help in max but could not get much idea. So I thought to just experiment directly and I flattened my map, what I expected was unfolded 3d mesh onto a plannar area like a 2d map. But no! I had lots of separate pieces of my mesh and they were arranged in a little box. So looking at that map I could tell about some majot parts which they belong to, but no way I could tell how they were connected. So I was about to give up and started with only basic shader. But I kept playing around and I remembered that one tutorial was talking about stitching parts together. So I started experimentin. I found that I can stitch related edges (shared edges or any shared element) to join all the different parts of map together to form faily identifiable flatten map. So day before yesterday I sat for like 14 hours straight and finally I got character's tshirt textured. At each stage I had high amount of excitement to see what result will come next in his t-shirt. And as this is my first time doing such a complex texturing it was difficult, but I enjoyed it a lot. So far I have got this :)

Old anatomy study drawings

Here are some of my anatomy study drawings I had done few months back. I forgot the name of the book (from library) I used for reference. It was something like Anatomy for figure drawing. I made these drawing to study general muscles and bones in male torso (hand and chest). I am planning to do similar drawings with more details of muscles some day soon. I did shading in these images to see in more details how shapes or volumes are formed.

3D character : Update 3

Here I am with updates on my 3d character. It's almost ocmpleted in terms of modelling. Only mouth is remaining now.

It took me so long to reach here because sometimes I was just running after a highly detailed character. So I kept moving vertices to get a very smooth detailed mesh. But when I see the result after rendering it's not much noticable. So there has to be an end to modelling, otherwise it goes on and on. So finally I decided on what I wanted and made it here.

Follwings are the main updates I have made

• Main modification was done to face, Nose is greatly changed. I added lips and eyes and ears.
• Clothes added.
  
• For shoes I added a bit of designs at the side and rear area.

I had drawn some sketches for his clothes. For t-shirt I detached polygons from his torso and then modified that to give shape of his t-shirt. For his trouser I started with a box covering hip area and then started slicing according to my need. Then I extruded 2 boxes from that box and then started shaping up the boxes to make it look like trouser. Whenever needed I used quick slice to cut the mesh. I am thinking of this character as adventurous too, so I thought of making his trouser suit that nature. So I added 2 big pockets as well. I had also planned to add some straps on top of the pockets, but I think I will not going to make it as of now.

I think major things remaining now is hair, mouth and his cap.



Next task will be to texture everything, and I am really novice at texturing, so I am going to have tough time with that.