Pausing on the animation a bit I thought I’d go back and work on the textures. Being a big fan of the Ambient Occlusion goddess but not of the extra long rendering times I did Amb Oc render maps for the boy’s body and head which I can use in a texture.

 

‘Roadkill’ was extremely helpful when unwrapping the UVs – last time i tried to do it manually it took me several more days. It does require some thought out seam selection but I didn’t have to deal with much point moving except for the hair.

I did attempt to paint the textures in Painter first, but they just looked dirty and rough. So I made several copies of the amb oc render map layer in photoshop and tried various filters which i multiplied with a block colour layer, The one used here is a chalk and charcoal filter with coloured pencil (inverted) for the darker parts. It seems to work well for the clothes, hair and face. For the hands I used the underpainting filter.

This is the final result, after adding a few touches of colour for the cheeks, lips, ears and eyebrows. A few problems are the eyelids which look horrible when shut, and also the low res that the render maps were produced. Seems that 512×512 were not enough and they come out pixellated though you can’t really see in the render region. Perhaps I will do another one for closeups of the face. There are a few details that need tweaking on the painted textures, seams especially, but overall I’m very happy with the result, the textures make the model look so much better!