Texturing

I decided to do the texturing first as I didn't want to have to wait until I had completed the model to see my character's face! My character is all red apart from his white eyes. As I was doing my character in 3D, I knew that I had much more room for detail, so I decided to make my character's eyes look more defined that its 2 dimensional cousin. Instead of modelling the eye definition on the character, i wanted to do it as a normal map, which tells light how to react with the surface of a 3D object, simulating 3 dimensional textures. The 2 main reasons for this are than it cuts down render time and polygon count but I also wanted to use a combination of new techniques to create my character. As normal maps are used in pretty much all next generation games, it seemed extremely important to have an understanding of what they are and how they work. I used the following tutorial:

http://planetpixelemporium.com/tutorialpages/normal2.html

This tutorial combined with Frank Plohmann's NLinShader helped me make a decent normal map, which I am extremely pleased with. Here's how I did it:


I used a sphere as a starting point, to represent the eye


I then modelled the eye lids around the eye


I then threw it in hyperNURBS to smooth it all out


Added symmetry


Altered the camera, put a white sphere around the whole thing and added colour, then rendered this out for the texture of my character's face


Then used the NLinShader to render this to be used for the normal map. I did a bit of work in photoshop to patch the two textures up but thats pretty much it


As you can see, the normal map gives the illusion that the eyes are 3 dimensional. A nice little trick I think