Oni Drunkard Model WIP: UVs, Textures, and Normal Maps

Lots of progress this week towards the finished model! This week was all about coloring the model, getting some of the effects working properly, and figuring out what kind of shaders I want to use in the finished project.

The first thing I did was the UV unwrap and some basic color block-outs. This was pretty simple, and all I really had to do was make sure I was leaving enough space on the uv map for the mask to take up the largest portion, to bake the most detail onto it. Looking at it now I'd scale the arm UVs down to make more room for the shirt UVs, so more of the normal map detail could show through.

I also made two separate textures for the mug and the Oni, to allow both to have a greater amount of detail. The texture is screwed up right now as I have to redo the colors on the mug, but other than that the islands are all planned out properly. The reason the top islands are so big is because those are for the cyclone that the head will be attached to, which I'll bake a ton of normal map information into.

Speaking of normal mapping...

Here's my first attempt at doing a normal bake! It's a bit rough, almost like a mid 2000s MMO character, but it still feels awesome regardless to push so much detail out of such a low poly mesh!

After that I added a matcap to the necklace and reduced the roughness, as well as giving a slight bit of subsurface scattering to make them appear glossy and translucent. I might tweak the alpha and emission on them too to make them appear glassy and slightly glowing, thinking about it now.

Then I added some wrinkles to a high poly shirt mesh and baked the detail onto the sleeves, as well as changed the color of the inner lining and collar. The design really is starting to come together now.

And now the big one, the dragon neck! This was really fun to do, and not too difficult either. I applied a noise texture to the cylinder and altered the mapping along the Y axis to stretch the noise laterally, creating a sort of streaking color. Then, all I had to do was play with the color and the alpha using color ramps, and the general texture was already done! What I'm going to do next with it is adjust the shading, add some low poly trailing bubbles or particles, and twist the actual mesh into more of a spiral to create a more convincing cyclone.

That's all for now though! Got a ton of work done, and almost ready to wrap up with this project finally.