Day 153

Texture time. So with the alien before, I spent a lot of time unfolding the model to apply the texture on. However with simpler characters, you can take short cuts. Instead of unfolding everything, I can take a straight on view of the object to make the map. The front will overlap with the back but if both sides are going to be the same color then that's fine. Here I'm using a side view of the body instead of a front view because the belly is going to be a different color. If I had used a front view, the lighter belly color would also appear on the back of the dog which I don't want. With a basic checker patter applied below, you can see how the pattern is applied from the side and not the front. It also means the belly and back area will get stretched but again having the dog mostly being one color, it won't be too much of a problem. I separated out the arms but not into left and right but top and bottom instead. This is because the paws will have pads which I only want showing up on the bottom side. So I took the two arm tops and stacked them on top of each other so they'll get the same texture and look the same. Remember blue means a single layer while pink is overlapped. Then I stacked the arm bottoms for the same reason. I also separated out the ears. Like the arms, they aren't left and right ears but the fronts and backs of the ears stacked on each other because the front are going to have a different color than the back. And lastly I have the nose.

The book told me to paint directly onto the model which kind of worked but wasn't that great. It just didn't have enough precision. So I ended up exporting the texture map and fixing things in Photoshop. The end result you can see below.

And finally here's the model with the texture applied. It's finally starting to look more like a dog than a cat.