XB2178 - Crew Textured and Animated!

After texturing my tank I then moved on to texturing my crew and repeating the process of generating a  normal and spec map for the models, which was really cool, in that I started to see a pipeline and how a pipeline is used and starting to understand the process that professionals go through.

Above is the unwrap for the crew, as you can see I wanted to avoid mirroring as it can be quite obvious and it also means you can't add too much detail or any badges or decals as they really make it obvious that the texture mirrors. Clearly the unwrap could've been organised and more uniform as both the driver and the gunner have very similar models and yet their unwraps are scaled differently. Additionally the unwrap on the legs could've been better as unwrapping the front as the legs separately to the rest of the legs only makes it obvious that there are seems there and so it  only makes it harder for me to texture as I have to make the texture very similar across those 2 seems.

 Above then is the diffuse I used for my crew which I had great fun texturing, I started off with the same base colours as the tank so that they matched and looked like as if they fitted together. I then repeated the same process as with the tank texture by adding tones and solid black lines for detail such as creases. I had great fun creating the leather coat and was what I wanted to have the most detail in and I overlayed a tileable leather texture over it as well. The faces were quite interesting as I never really paint faces and the last time I made a face it turned out so bad that it's now our game dev group's logo https://twitter.com/NiceFaceGames.

I started the faces with a block colour, similar to how I started texturing everything else.

Only I then added solid black lines at the start to help guide me where the tones would go. I would also double check the 3D model to make sure that the lines were appropriately placed.

With the lines in a seperate layer at the top I could then easily add light and dark tones to make the face less flat and suggest areas of light and shadow, as the 3D model wouldn't have this detail as it is very low poly.

After which I can then add things such as eyes and scares and start to finish up on his face.

A little more tonal work to add detail around his eyes now that I know for certain where they are.

And there he is looking as handsome as ever. In hindsight his eyes and the eyes of his comrades as well are pretty huge, but I don't care at this point, got way too much to do to worry about it.

After the diffuse is done I then repeat my tank texture's process of using nDO2 to generate normals, here I used the leather preset.

 And finally I used a desaturated diffuse map with the levels modified and areas whitened to make it look shinier, such as the leather gloves of the commander.

Below then is a render of the crew together and posed and they are actually now animated. The animation runs along the lines of the commander is pointing about on a map and moving his head and pauses to check that the other 2 understand the plan. It leaves me to create a map and something stacked up for the map to be on however I do have a good idea of what they will be.