Month: March 2017

Before texturing and animating the character I had to UV unwrap my character. This was particularly hard as despite the character being an ultra low poly character, the smart UV project did not work so I had to manually unwrap the character by marking seams over the model. In particular, the hair and skirt were difficult to unwrap.

I then began the process of texturing the character, this may not be the final texture of the model, I will continue to work on it adding more detail to the character however it gives more of an idea what the end result will look like if I rig the character fully textured.

Working in Blender I had to think about the face normals and make sure that they were all facing the right way so that when it came to texture painting, I would paint on the right sides. You can see the direction of the normals by looking at the blue lines protruding from the faces.

I also worked on creating a ‘lip’ on the left-hand side of each of the tube sections, this will help to connect them together and make the painted textures flow more seamlessly.

Here is my most recent attempt at modeling my character in Blender. I have gone with an extremely low polygon model of a young girl, as I think the idea of a child will make the user feel more sympathy for the character and want to escape the underground. However, I have gone with the low poly style as the character herself will not have a great deal of backstory or narrative so does not require a great deal of detail in her physical form. I need to develop the face a little further as although her face will not be visible for her side view, therefore will not require any animation, it still needs a something else to it to make her look more characterized. After that I need to proceed with animating the character using Blenders rig to create her walk cycle.

I started to model my character in blender however it was a steep learning curve to go from modeling a very simple platform made up of cubes and cylinders to a more detailed character. I wanted to go with an ambiguous style as the character itself is not an important part of the narrative. The character is simply a tool to symbolize the user when completing the tasks to progress through the narrative of the game. Therefore I planned to have the character in a very low polygon style, with an invisible face covered by hair and a hood, so that I do not have to animate any sort of facial expressions. However upon review of my model I think that I am going to start again and try to be even more simple with the design. More like these: