Telling Tales: Week 6 - Painting UVs

This whole week, our goal is to finish up painting and applying the textures on the props and characters. We have finished everything by the end of the week, and I am pleased with the textured outcome. The details of the textures are retained pretty well even after being scanned, which eliminates one of our major concerns regarding the project. Dan rendered this scene with the Arnold renderer so that the final scene will have good quality of lighting. 

Textured Scene

We print out the UVs on A3 papers and used acrylic paint to paint all textures on A3 watercolour papers. We used light box to make the outlines of the UVs visible when painting on the watercolour paper, and also to avoid having the polygonal edges in the final texture.

I did most of the paintings with the exception of the tent walls, rattle 3, mask, Shaman's head and Shaman's robe which are painted by Dan. I also modelled the wind chimes, and learn how to unwrap the UVs. Unwrapping seems like a complicated process when Dan showed me how to do it. After showing me several times on how to unwrap some parts of the wind chimes, he lets me try to unwrap the UVs and watch me do it. This is the perks of having Dan in the team, he is really patient and hence a good teacher. Also, if I messed up he will come to the rescue. Despite all that, I don't want to take this for granted because I want to fix the problems by myself as much as I can so that I'll take some learning points out of it.

Steps to unfold UVs: (No screenshots because I forgot to do so)

1. Open the UV Editor
2. Do the UV mapping of the object
3. Use UV mode, select a vertex of part of the object to be unfolded, press command + click, choose ' To Shell' to select the whole part of the object and move it onto an empty space
4.  Select the edges which have to be cut so that the object will unfold nicely. Think of it like deconstructing 3D shape into 2D.
5. Next, go to Polygon > Cut UV Edges
6. After that, go back to UV mode, select one of the vertices, command + click on the UV Editor, choose 'To Shell' to select the whole object, and go to Polygon > Unfold (or shortcut shift+click on the UV Editor, then choose Unfold)