Texture Time!!
With all the harder stuff out of the way, its time to take a small break by texturing the models! First count of buisness is to texture the base body of the octopus. Also at this time I have just come up with a name for my character: O+ or O-Positive. I thought it would be a fun name for it, considering its a medic, so O+ for blood type, and its an octopus so it kinda fits in with having O for it.
When it comes to texturing, I started looking at Hammond/Wrecking Ball’s texturing for Overwatch again, as I was having difficulty figuring out the approach I wanted to go for. Whilst I did have an exact colour palette based on an image I found for my moodboard, I wanted to make sure I painted it right. Taking a look at Hammond, we see a lot of flat colours, but all of those blend or are of a very close variation to each other, or simply it is affected by the lighting.
Something I came to realise whilst studying Overwatch’s character textures, is that a majority of them are flat colours, and there doesn’t seem to be much use of height/normal mapping. Whilst that may be an exception in Character SKINS, its much more noticable in the main versions of the roster once you take a look. However, they still manage to create really detailed and in-depth textures for their characters.
Starting with the Octopus body! I had my colour palette as previously mentioned, so I started getting to work on applying the base colour, which was orange, and adding some close values with a rough brush to give it a feel of texture in its colour.
Following on from this, I added the head dots as and I started to look at using gradients for the arms and legs, as that would be the best way to display that range of colours in a really pretty way, but also in a way that fits the style of overwatch. I had some struggles with originally planning and putting the gradients down, as I tried making use of position based gradients, but I was unable to mask parts of the model out of it or move the gradient to my pleasing.
As a result, I did a bit of research into it, and found out that there was a way to create gradients and position them by hand, and it was to make use of a fill layer using a type of projection with a white mask.
Having a bunch of these fill layers in folders resulted in this gradient look! As the hardness being lower means that the colour fades out towards the boundary anyways instead of being cropped exactly at it. This was a much easier way to about things and was incredibly satisfying to see come to fruition.
Also I decided to paint on the head dots, I was thinking about doing it for the body also but I decided against it, as it would mess with the look of the gradient, and I was looking into smart materials I could use as a sort of skin to make it feel more octopus-like, as it being non reflective or wet looking was really thwarting with my senses. I would argue it also adds to the stylization of overwatch, and the roughness is very easily tweakable if it is too little, as I wouldn’t want to defer from the style.
Note for the skin overlay texture, I put it at 10 opacity as it did have a colour property, now whilst I could just remove this, the colour fits quite well with the general tone of the texture so I decided to keep all the properties as this looked the best and was easy to tweak if needed. This concludes the texturing of O+ itself, now its time for its suit!
Suit Texturing!!!
With colour and life brought to O+ itself, it was time to do the same for its suit, and make it a whole finished character model! I made heavy use and reference of Wrecking Ball from Overwatch 2 to create my suit texture. A majority of it from what I have noticed is just flat colours with metalic and roughness adjusted, even features such as polyfill would reach the same look. The only other things is that the metal appears stained, so I can just use a brush and smudge to get that stained painted effect.
Now before I do go any further, I do have 3 seperate versions of the final suit that I made that I really didn’t like that much. I think this texture was the hardest for me to face, considering there isn’t much topology or showing detail on this suit, overall I think its quite bland, so I had trouble applying different colours and making it look detailed. I made extensive use of height layers later to compensate.
As you can see, the most substantial change was between v1 and v2. Mainly I realised that the design I had created for the suit at the beginning of this project wouldn’t really fit Overwatch’s design, unless I was going for a character akined to that of Junkrat or Junker Queen, however I wasn’t really going for that, I was exploring the space animals in suits type of thing.
Generally v1 was just not working and I felt it was generally really lacking of a texture, again I didn’t have much topology to work with as I didn’t sculpt the suit for details (silly me) so I had to change my design on the fly essentially to fit and look more like Hammond’s Suit. Luckily for me, Wrecking Ball was the perfect reference so it was quite easy to come up with something to make that change, and you can see it further develop across v2 to v3, especially with the middle panel. I made use of height painting to make it look like wires on the surface, and also layers in the panel area.
There is one more iteration and thats the current one I’m using, the only major difference is the levels of metallic and roughness, as I felt that the previous iterations were too shiny, and Wrecking Ball isn’t overly shiny due to the stained nature of the metal, as a result I turned the roughness up and it seemed to do the trick just fine! Also there is a texture on the visor, its just a glass one that I alpha clipped so I could continue to see O+ for testing.
Something that does really urk me, is that the textures look infinitely better in Substance Painter than blender. This will always be a criticism of mine, but I really dislike how blender processes specific textures in viewport, typically metallic ones. However! This is all I have for the week, its time for the dreaded animation! Until week 10!