I decided to create two single meshes, one for the head and the other for the body. This gave me a head texture with a bigger size and I didn't have to limit the number of textures. The head wireframe can be seen in Fig.07 and the full body wireframe in Fig.08.



I wasn't sure if this was the correct choice. While using one texture for the head gave me better quality, my advice after further testing is to divide the mesh in a different way. Splitting the head and arms into two different textures caused a different skin tone and this is because of different layer blending methods during the texturing.

Unwrap / Texturing

Unwrapping meshes for an artist is pretty boring. Luckily nowadays there are lots of different software packages to speed up the process, but this isn't enough to give you a good unwrap. If the character is intended for a video game then it is very important to use the whole UV space as much as possible. In this way the textures will have more resolution. Other than this, bear in mind that you need to place the unwrap seams in strategic places, like less visible points or in a way that permits you to paint the textures easily and without color edges.

For my texturing I used Photoshop with the help of Zapplink. I don't want to explain how Zapplink works but, quickly, what I do when I have the grabbed the ZBrush screen from inside Photoshop is to place my photo reference and adjust my reference over my model with the Liquify tool. This is a very powerful and quick way to texture a model and avoids cutting and pasting pieces of photos, smudges and spots over the texture. The clothes were just hand painted and there is a base color with some dirt blended over it (Fig.09).

Rendering

The render is just a screenshot of the Max viewport. I used a DirectX shader made by Laurens Corijn – for more info just visit: http://www.laurenscorijn.com

And that's all! I want to thank everyone for the feedback received for this character and everyone before me that made tutorials and Making Ofs. I hope that this will help you. For all crits, suggestions, support (or job contract!) feel free to contact me at: moonx2006@gmail.com