We took a hilarious turn for the ridiculous here and I could not be more pleased.
With some reasonably technical work done in the Graph Editor during the animation test, I wanted to take a break and do something a bit simpler that I have more experience with: texturing! I love doing simple models with photo textures. It adds tremendous realism to whatever you’re doing and adds wow factor to your project.
Unless you’re putting your own face on a VR dummy. Then it’s just stupid and very funny.
I’m glad I took a detour and did this now, because giving the enemy model human features (at least at like a GoldenEye level) is going to up the immersion right away in VR. I actually couldn’t believe just how Virtua Cop this model felt immediately. Here are a few things I figured out while I put it together:
First, the usual strategy would be to give painstaking consideration to your model unwrapping first, export the UVs to a JPEG image, and paint over it in PhotoShop or GIMP. I started this way, but realized with the simplicity of this model, it would be trivial to put the texture together first in GIMP without even seeing the unwrapped UVs, organize the texture any way I wanted (this is really the hard part) then just drag the faces around in small groups back in Blender. Here’s the texture I put together, just to demonstrate the sheer silliness of what I did here.
One cool productivity trick I picked up–which maybe other people would think to do immediately, but I just stumbled into it–is to turn on snapping to vertices in the actual UV window when you want to match mirrored faces in the model perfectly (like the top of both shoes, for example). I do a little too much “eyeballing” when I work in Blender and I’m trying to break the habit.
When I was done laughing at this, I knew there was one thing I had to do before moving on. Here it is:
I’m capable of better than this–frankly everyone is–but for the moment we just needed something to look at before getting the necessary animations started and heading back to work in Unity. Now we’re ready to do it.
Next post, we’ll get our moving Me into the firing range room, and with any luck, start blasting him.
Todd Mitchell is a US Midwest-based comedy writer and game developer with bylines at Weekly Humorist, Fanbyte, Slackjaw, End of the Bench Sports, and more. He’s the author of Inside Video Game Creation, the founder of CodeWritePlay, and host of the GameDev Breakdown podcast. Follow him on Twitter @Mechatodzilla.