Molefa - Texturing

 The texture map for this model was produced through planar and cylindrical mapping. The original texture is hand painted via the same process as the robot, and after a series of changes to the saturation and contrast of the hand painted texture I overlaid a single heavily modified photo-realistic texture referenced from elephant skin.

The accessory for this model was done pretty quickly as it was more an after-thought, I cylindrically unwrapped the mesh and then manually stretched out the vertex points on the edges for depth. I kept reloading the texture on to the model in 3DsMax to ensure the colour of the canvas holding pouch was in harmony with the tone of the Molefa.

It is worth mentioning before manually unwrapping the model I experimented inside ZBrush with their UV unwrapping process. After researching how the computer works out the seam points for pelt-unwrapping the model I discovered it creates an ambient occlusion map of the model in its current state - and then draws the seam lines off the darkest areas on the map. This is a really clever process as it is checking for areas of the model which are most likely to be hidden or dark in detail - hiding the texture seam.

Experimenting with this process lead to mixed results and I decided to take an alternate approach within the software. There is another UV mapping method called Unwrap Vertex Painting which allowed me to paint areas of the model I wanted to 'protect' from seam lines and other sections I would want to 'attract' seams (Such as the centerline of the underbody). The image below shows this part of the process. Red is for protect, Blue is for attract.