First textured model!

Rincewind wasn’t kidding when he told me he was rusty in 3d modeling, etc… But, after a long time, he managed to finish the texturing of the main character of Grey:

We’re still not happy with some elements (namely the fur trimming of his robe, and the hair, both could use some shader work, but we’ll work on that after).

If you look at the initial concept, we dropped the book on his waist:

Texturing makes a world of difference:

For this model, we’re using 3 texture maps (in which one of the textures encodes different things, more on that below):

The diffuse map encodes the color of the surface… Since the player will be looking at most objects from a bit far, we’ve opted to used a 512×512 color map (with alpha testing for the hair):

Then we use a 512×512 normal map to give some detail to the surface, by perturbing the orientation of the surface… This is a lighting trick, so it doesn’t correspond with actual surface detail:

Finally, we have the mask map, that encodes specular power (the shininess of the surface), the specular gloss (how spread is that shininess) and the ambient occlusion (how hard is it for light to hit that place in the model, it adds extra depth in low-lighting scenes).

Specular power (the whiter, the more shiny it is):

Specular gloss (the whiter, the more narrower is the shiny bit):

Ambient occlusion (the whiter, the more light from the environment that area receives):

Another shot from the end result:

There’s still some areas that could use improvement, but considering that we have one million other things to do, this will have to do… that and the fact that nothing is ever perfect enough when you spend hours at it!

Next step on the art is rigging, skinning and animating the character… Then we can import it into SurgeEd and start looking at something much better than what we’ve been looking at so far (really, programmer art is really a terrible blight upon mankind!)