UV Mapping!
Time to UV my models to get ready for the texturing process! I decided to move onto this first as it was the quickest task for me to do, considering I just have to mark my models seams, before Smart UV Unwrapping and marking the boundaries for the UV to be even. Starting with the squid itself, I had 2 iterations, as the first had some inconsistancies in the bottom left of the UV. Whilst it would’ve worked fine in any case, I still want to make sure I create efficient UV’s for the future work and portfolio reasons, so I remade it.
Following from this, I UV’ed the suit, smaller details such as the bolts on the suit and the suction cups I didn’t UV, as going into Substance Painter, it would automatically adjust. However for future reference, I will UV the singular one before I start copying and pasting it around, this also applies to the bolts. Helmet also had 2 Versions, on before all the extras and details.
Rigging!
Following the UV unwrapping, I decided to create the base armature for my model! Weighting it will be an issue for next week as there are a lot more technicalities I need to consider when it comes to weights so I will work on that next week instead of this week.
As you can see, the rig itself is quite basic, this is due to the motion of mind that it is an octopus/squid type character, so as a result I have no need for functions such as Inverse Kinetics and CR, CL and Controller bones considering I can rotate these bones on individual origins when I select the whole chain, resulting in the same type of squid/octopus flow that you could expect in real life. It is interesting however having to rig a creature that has no bones in real life.
Alongside this, I wanted to create a seperate rig for the suit, as I feel like weighting it to this would be a nightmare, as well as the fact that the multiple bones would split the geometry of the suit, unless I was rigging one part to one bone specifically, which has its own set of problems from experience. It also allows me to have much more control over what i’m doing when it comes to animation later down the line.
For now this is all! I will delve into weight painting next week, followed by texturing, animation and rendering processes! See you in week 8!