Chest Mimic #2 Textures and Rigg

Following up from my last post I've been working on the paint job for my chest mimic monster. Above you can see the simple untextured geometry and wire frame of this classic Dungeons and Dragons beastie. The first stop with painting any model is to map the UV coordinates creating a nice unwrapped flat version of the model which should be intuitive to paint. Below you can see the UVs layed out.

Because this model is based on a my previous treasure chest model, I re-used much of the work from the chest. One problem that keeps tripping me up with texturing is bump mapping. For some reason the bump map seems to arbitrarily reverse on some map pieces. Pretty annoying and it can be fairly hard to spot, below is an early bump test. An attempt to spot reverse bump problems.

 Below is an example of how I start painting a model. I work in basic blocks of colour, the basic tone, then a highlight and a shadow tone. I work in photoshop and frequently check how the textures are working on the 3d model gradually adding detail and tightening the finish.

 

It takes some time of course but I end up with textures like this.

 

I've also managed to get a rig on this model and will be starting animation tomorrow. There were quite a lot of teething problems with setting the mimic up. He has such stumpy legs. Thin legs are much easier to set up. When ever you have characters that are a bit chunky it causes problems, as fat rolls or tissue that collides with other tissue is very hard to convey with game models. It generally means more joints to drive the skin, and as with poly count for games a low joint count is desirable. Games models are driven by a skeleton, the model or mesh is sometimes called a skin. Skinning is the process of assigning different parts of the mesh to different parts of the skeleton or joints.

Above you can see the rig in this case a number of wire handles which can be selected to move the model. The idea is to have as few handles as possible give the maximum amount of control to the model.