Project 3: Modelling and Texturing a Character (Punk Kid)

This week's project involved modeling a 3D character and applying a texture to it. Using Autodesk Maya, I created the Punk Kid character for my final project. This character is a cartoony parody of the Joker character that recurs in much of the Batman franchise. To communicate this I attempted to give him the key features that have defined the Joker character in each of the different mediums in which he has been involved (various comics, cartoon shows and live action films). These features include his trademark enormous, goofy, evil grin, large, beakish nose, white face paint, green hair and purple clothing. As my parody of the Joker is an annoying neighbourhood child, I gave him a propeller hat (a great cliche for depicting childhood figures), filthy clothes and dirty skin in order to effectively portray him as a stereotypical child.

When texturing the Punk Kid, I stuck to using mostly solid, flat colours as I am aiming for an overall cartoony style for the final project. Although I did use some grunge brushes in Adobe Photoshop to create the dirty look of the character's clothes and skin.
Although I'm working on a cartoony style for my characters, some areas of this model still looks a bit bland to me with just one solid colour. At first, I failed to unwrap the UVs of the model very well, which made it difficult to texture these areas without one solid colour and neglected any detail. I later decided to unwrap the UVs again and did a much beter job. I was able to add more to the texture, such as the smiley face on his shirt, paint on his face and dirt on his clothes and hands.

Below is a front, side and top view of the 'Punk Kid' character:



To add some final touches to the character, I created pimples on his face as a normal map. I found this process very difficult at first as I couldn't bake the normals properly. This was resulting in weird solid black lines and other strange bits of shading all over the character's face and entire body. After seeking help from a few different people I learnt how to fix my problems. To fix all of the random lines, etc that were appearing on the mesh, I edited the normal map in Photoshop and then had to delete transparency that Maya had applied to the mesh after baking it. It was a pretty simple normal map but I'm happy enough with it as I don't really plan on using much normal mapping on my final scene's characters.

Below is a screenshot of the normal map I applied to the character: