Guess who decided to redo all of their UV mapping again.
That's right. Me.
For Aurora the intent was always to have her cel shaded in a cartoon/anime style, but I deviated from that while working on her because I knew the amount of work it would take would be a headache to say the least. From the start I've wanted to try and replicate the design/shading process of the Guilty Gear game series, but until now that seemed a bit above my pay grade. It might still well be, but might as well try.
The character design process is detailed in this GDC talk about the animation of the game:
The process has 3 key components as far as I'm aware to create the look of the games, those being:
Box UV Maps to create the interior lines
Custom normal mapping done in clusters to control the lighting of the figure
multiple color maps to determine the shading color of each component of the character
I can tell I'm not going to be able to recreate the look entirely with my character, but I still want to try and see what effects I can at least somewhat replicate using my own knowledge first.
To start, I downloaded the UV squares addon to assist in streamlining my UV process. A lot would have to be done by hand, but this at least made it a bit easier. Slowly but surely I converted each UV island to boxes.
The first object that was fully mapped and textured was the shirt. The interior lines are all done via manipulating the UVs to lay partially in the color block and in the black background. Basically, anywhere you see black on the figure, it's the UV seam going between two colors.
Here you can see what I mean. the UV pokes out into the black, and because the line is created by the UV itself as opposed to the pixels of the texture image, the lines aren't resolution dependent, and can stay crisp no matter how much they're zoomed in on.
Additional features were created this way, such as the lines on her neck and clavicle.
And here's how she looks partially completed. The detail on her face and hair are especially striking, and look great in closeups.
Here you can see the varying thickness on the interior lines creating definition in the hair too.
That's all for now. A bit of a short entry, but there was a lot of technical stuff to run through. Hopefully I'll have the color blockouts done by next week and can move on to attempting the normal adjustments and shader logic.
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