Time to Prioritize the Priorities
I find that again, I have some very mixed feelings about the final outcome of this weeks comic. The final product, is every bit what i would expect of myself when racing to a deadline at 11 pm the night before. Pretty much “meh”. Lighting and shadow was well below what I was hoping for. The week’s worth of detail work I put into Bernard is lost due to a short sightedness in camera placement, and I can’t for the life of me figure out where my notes on fonts and speech bubbles are and thus the communication for robots looks like anybody’s speech.
The upside is that in my week’s worth of detail work, I discovered a new way of handling textures. This is technical , so if you are just waiting for the punchline you can skip to the bottom.
For anyone in the know about 3d modeling, anything you build needs to colored. This can be done in one of two ways. With a “procedural” map, which is a vastly automated process.It’s akin to a spray-painter. You pretty much get the same effect everywhere. For more detail though, you need to use a “texture” map, which is more like making customized wall paper that is then pasted onto the model.
In the past, I had inferred (since it was never clearly taught at my school) that each piece of geometry (a 3d model) had it’s own file texture. Looking at Bernard in this piece, he is actually made up of a head, a jaw, a torso, two shoulder actuators, two bicept/shoulder blocks, and 4 more pieces to each arm, an abdominal sphere, a foot sphere, a stand, and a spring. 15 pieces all told. While the spring, actuators, arm pieces, spheres, and spring have one procedural map (the base has another), the head, jaw, and torso have texture maps. Actually a texture map. It’s a photoshop file (psd) that “maps” the different aspects of the imagery to the different parts of the body. In the past I would have had a head map, a jaw map, and a torso map. THree different psd files. Three different map slots. But this time I tried something different. When determining all the mapping points I simply shrunk down the size so that I could fit the three maps into the space of one. Fewer documents, fewer megabytes, and it looks fine.
When the lighting is right, the camera angle isn’t awful, and the artist gets things before his actual bed time has long gone