Sunday, May 30, 2010

Return to Research Station Gamma

I did this over a couple of nights after work. It was a rush job for a 'zine needing a cover done quick so it was a bit slap dash, but it was fun to do. The 'zine ended up going with something else, but what can you do?

I rendered out the basic textured forms in 3ds Max to establish lighting and reflections and then layered painting and more textures in Photoshop.

Second Life Avatar Textures

For the past few months I have been involved in Second Life developing an interactive hospital for visualization and 'serious games' training for a client. Part of the contract involved creation of several avatar textures.

The image here is a sample of some of those textures. Overall I had to do around 30 unique skins (3 textures each), for each gender covering a variety of client defined ethnicities.

Each skin requires three 512x512 texture pages conforming to a predefined (and rather bad) UV layout - one for the head, one for the torso, and one for the hips and legs. As this is Second Life developers are only able to access the diffuse textures, so no specular or normal maps were created.

I used Photoshop and ZBrush with the ZAppLink plugin. The texturing took about 2 and a half weeks to complete.