Character Texturing - The Wrap Problem

Its been a hard couple of days since the lighting was completed for the first part of the jungle set, it was nearly ready for rendering as i have been working on the textures for the explorer character, the basic colours were blocked in photoshop (using my main character photoshop painting produced in pre-production as a colour swatch reference) and i started adding detailed clothing textures to the t-shirt and jacket. Then we hit a huge problem...

The problem started back in March when i had completed the Explorer model and it was ready to be UVed, due to many dissertation problems i didint have the time to UV my modelled character, animation and more importantly rigging needed to start so we decided that we could wrap deform a UVed explorer mesh to the rigged and animated one, proberly close to rendering time. With this in mind i left it to complete my dissertation. But the problem crept back on me yesterday, the wrap deform mesh that i UVed last week wouldnt work, every computer in the house crashed when applying the wrap, the method would work successfully but the computers couldnt handle it. As these are the computers that we will finally render on the wrap method cant be used. Which leaves us with a fully rigged, weighted and animated character not UVed! And so cant be textured! Myself and Rob discussed it and we have decided to block colour the polygon faces of the main character in Maya. The same colour swatches i designed in pre-production are to be used. So for the past day ive block coloured three explorer characters and placed one into the jungle scene.


Screen Shot of my block coloured explorer character in AutoDesk Maya - The desired poygon faces were highlighted, a quick set selection saved (reduce selection time later on in colouring process) and then block coloured using my pre-designed colour swatches.

Another two screen shots of my explorer character in AutoDesk Maya - swatches are fully finalised, character posed and smoothed.

The end result.... was actually really surprising! Aztec Escape has a simple artistic style, the sleeping character was more or less coloured in the same way, and so the character fits into the jungle environment and looks great! I had worries of the quality deminishing due to the wrap problem, but infact it works better than having a realistic and detailed character texture. Every piece of Explorer animation done will have to have its chararcter block coloured, this will take time, but is far more quicker than re-rigging, weighting and animating.


Final Render Shot of Coloured Explorer in Final Lighting - Jungle Environment Set 1. The primitive block colour texturing actually suits the style of the film, which is a great relief as i really wanted to texture the charcter properly.