Hi everyone,

I have been wrestling with a problem for weeks and I'm asking you for your help. I've never been that good at texture mapping things that looked sort of organic. I.E. Human characters. Well, I went through every tutorial I can find and even downloaded the demo version of Deep Paint to help out. But to no avail. I need to find some way of putting a texture on my character that makes it look some what good. I haven't found anything on the net that can do that. I already understand the basics of UVW mapping but no one shows how to map anything but boxes and spheres. If anyone has a solution to my problem please let me know. Thanks for all your help.

Alex

My approach is usually to use as many procedural shaders as possible. However, painted bitmaps are needed from time to time (specially for human skin). To get accurate painted bitmaps, I usually unwrap the mesh and export it as a bitmap to paint over in photoshop. I tend to layer a lot of proceduarl textures and bitmaps to ge the right look, and I blend them over the character using alpha maps (instead of painting them as most people do, I can usually get away with b/w gradient ramps). Going procedural can save you a lot of time with mapping issues. But when you do need UVW coords, try unwraping your mesh and use that as a paint template. That way, your map will perfectly match your model (as long as you don't change the UVW coords). Hope this helps. Luck!

Sergio Muci

Try playing around with the "unwrap uvw" modifier. Go to "edit" you can move the map around on the mesh, stretching and compressing it and you can see the changes on your model in real time. try it on something simple to get the hang of it.

Don't feel too bad, human skin is one of the more eleusive and difficult materials to get looking good, in part because it interacts with light in a complex fashion. And then to top it off, you have all the other details that make people look real, such as the variations of shading around joints, wrinkles, blemishes, etc.

Skin has a layer of oil on top of it, giving it a specular component separate from the underlying, mostly matte surface. You might wish to simulate this by using a shellac material to put in a separate highlight for the oil layer. Also, human skin is covered with fine hairs which cause it to scatter back light from behind it. I've best simulated this with a falloff in the self illumination channel, but the approach isn't great - in real life skin is slightly transluscent, effectively more so because of the hairs on the surface, and I haven't mucked about enough to find a really satisfying solution. What I'm getting at here is that once you really have captured a sense of human skin in your material everything else gets a lot easier, wrinkles etc become much less of a chore to get right.