This is a texture from a private model, so I'll just display what I did. Also this is going to get weird very quick so I'm tagging as NSFW.
The original model had no texture for underneath the character's skirt, it had ambient shading for the thighs and then turned into a solid black texture like shorts that covered from the thighs upward.
Original texture (cropped, resized, watermarked):
My texture:
Motivation
I've been doing 3D work for a while, including model production, but the UV unwrap stage is still a nightmare for me so I decided to skip that with my own models and do some texturing on someone else's mesh, understanding how the UV was unwrapped and getting some practise with my graphics tablet which has been gathering dust whilst I completed my work projects.
I wanted to keep as close to the original style as possible, which I think I succeeded at. The baked-in ambient lighting was fiddly to get around; the original model features a LOT of shading in the actual texture, most of it very soft, whereas my shading is more defined, which I feel better gives a sense of depth where there is a lack of geometry.
The Process:
The first task was extracting the UV. I imported the model into blender, opened the UV panel and exported at the original resolution 1024x1024. I was only modifying a 256x256 patch, so I cut that area out and added it on-top of the original texture.
I could now see how the UV worked, but because this area of the model is mostly unseen (it's under the character's skirt) so seeing my changes was awkward. I edited the model to remove the skirt and the objects that were hanging in-front of the torso. I kept as much as I could so I could have a good image/lighting reference.
I then removed the black-texture by grabbing the skin colour and - with my graphics tablet - brushing over the top of the black until it was all skin-colour. I was using the brightest skin colour as a diffuse so I could apply shading at the end.
Identifying the curvature of the underpants was actually very hard as the UV was inaccurate (black texture + in an area you're unlikely to look at justifies this). I added dots to the vertices on the UV map and started drawing lines and seeing how they sat on the character's hips until I identified the UVs that corresponded to where the hip bones are, where the top of the gluteal muscles are and where the base of the buttocks is.
The most difficult part of identifying the UV would be the point at the base of the underpants where the back meets the front as this involved aligning textures on a seam. The second point where this happens is the side, but that was easier to identify due to the geometry being less "tight".
After blocking the skin, I drew about 5 or 6 different underwear designs, looking over references on Google images (basically searched for "anime panties" and found images that captured every angle - no surprise over the prevalence of this material). Because anime is 2D, the way the underpants "sat" on the geometry was difficult to infer, so I had to go by real-world knowledge of anatomy and fashion design at this point.
Figuring out where the belly button is located helped a lot here; I did this by moving the arms of the original model down to the side of the model and using knowledge of anatomy to deduce where the belly button is. I did an anime-style upside-down tear-drop for the belly button to match the reference images and to avoid shading non-existent geometry. This gave a good overall reference for the rest of the texture work.
After blocking out the underpants, I went around and drew the seams with a light blue, the lack of resolution really came to light here. The low-accuracy UV and the low texture resolution meant that stray pixels appeared often. I tried to keep the aliasing in mind here, but there are obvious issues still.
The shading stage was certainly the most difficult, but it was also the quickest stage to complete as the reference point was there, the design was there and I knew how the UV sat. I followed the geometry to create the shading around the sides of the tummy and followed that line down to the top of the inner-thigh.
I used the same technique around the butt to highlight the geometry there. There is no geometry for the spine or the top of the gluteal muscle, unfortunately I had to use shading to fake that geometry there, but the cheeks were separated by well-defined geometry so I used that to get the curvature of the bottom looking right. You can see obvious circular shapes for the cheeks. The lower part of the circular shading was difficult as that went into low-accuracy UVs (there's still a few stray pixels there as a result).
I kept to the geometry to shade the lower part of the cheeks and followed that shading underneath and round to the front. I treated the light source as if it was coming down from above the model. A lot of colour gradients are here, which is the style of the rest of the model's texture.
Finalising
This was all made with the skirt mesh deleted, so it looked correct if the character was running around with no skirt on. I had to correct the overall texture for the ambient lighting of when the skirt mesh is present (which is why the texture looks sun-burnt in the images).
I looked at the original gradient for when the texture was black and looked at how the gradient was changing there. I matched the same location for the start of the gradient and darkened all the skin above that area. I avoided re-shading the underpants as too much of the colour information would have been lost and they'd end up looking pink/blue/grey in colour rather than white.
Conclusion
This made me realise that I am pretty capable of making passable texture modifications to models. I expected this experiment to utterly fail as this is my first texture modification on a humanoid model.
The hundreds of Minecraft skins I made has certainly taught me about ambient lighting and doing what looks-best for textures that have baked lighting, without that experience I would not have had the shading correct, especially where the skin meets at the top of the inner-thigh.
Additionally, the UV map around this area was terrible. Where it was sparse, I had difficulty aligning and finding curvature. Where it was dense, my mistakes were hidden so were difficult to track. It did show me that having a crap UV doesn't mean the texture will end up crap. With my own models, I've stressed over the UV mapping a lot; now I can stress less and put-up-with terrible UV unwraps.
The low resolution of the original model was infuriating, but justified as originally this area of texture was solid black. I can blame 90% of the issues in this texture work on the low resolution.
The original model had no texture for underneath the character's skirt, it had ambient shading for the thighs and then turned into a solid black texture like shorts that covered from the thighs upward.
Original texture (cropped, resized, watermarked):
My texture:
Motivation
I've been doing 3D work for a while, including model production, but the UV unwrap stage is still a nightmare for me so I decided to skip that with my own models and do some texturing on someone else's mesh, understanding how the UV was unwrapped and getting some practise with my graphics tablet which has been gathering dust whilst I completed my work projects.
I wanted to keep as close to the original style as possible, which I think I succeeded at. The baked-in ambient lighting was fiddly to get around; the original model features a LOT of shading in the actual texture, most of it very soft, whereas my shading is more defined, which I feel better gives a sense of depth where there is a lack of geometry.
The Process:
The first task was extracting the UV. I imported the model into blender, opened the UV panel and exported at the original resolution 1024x1024. I was only modifying a 256x256 patch, so I cut that area out and added it on-top of the original texture.
I could now see how the UV worked, but because this area of the model is mostly unseen (it's under the character's skirt) so seeing my changes was awkward. I edited the model to remove the skirt and the objects that were hanging in-front of the torso. I kept as much as I could so I could have a good image/lighting reference.
I then removed the black-texture by grabbing the skin colour and - with my graphics tablet - brushing over the top of the black until it was all skin-colour. I was using the brightest skin colour as a diffuse so I could apply shading at the end.
Identifying the curvature of the underpants was actually very hard as the UV was inaccurate (black texture + in an area you're unlikely to look at justifies this). I added dots to the vertices on the UV map and started drawing lines and seeing how they sat on the character's hips until I identified the UVs that corresponded to where the hip bones are, where the top of the gluteal muscles are and where the base of the buttocks is.
The most difficult part of identifying the UV would be the point at the base of the underpants where the back meets the front as this involved aligning textures on a seam. The second point where this happens is the side, but that was easier to identify due to the geometry being less "tight".
After blocking the skin, I drew about 5 or 6 different underwear designs, looking over references on Google images (basically searched for "anime panties" and found images that captured every angle - no surprise over the prevalence of this material). Because anime is 2D, the way the underpants "sat" on the geometry was difficult to infer, so I had to go by real-world knowledge of anatomy and fashion design at this point.
Figuring out where the belly button is located helped a lot here; I did this by moving the arms of the original model down to the side of the model and using knowledge of anatomy to deduce where the belly button is. I did an anime-style upside-down tear-drop for the belly button to match the reference images and to avoid shading non-existent geometry. This gave a good overall reference for the rest of the texture work.
After blocking out the underpants, I went around and drew the seams with a light blue, the lack of resolution really came to light here. The low-accuracy UV and the low texture resolution meant that stray pixels appeared often. I tried to keep the aliasing in mind here, but there are obvious issues still.
The shading stage was certainly the most difficult, but it was also the quickest stage to complete as the reference point was there, the design was there and I knew how the UV sat. I followed the geometry to create the shading around the sides of the tummy and followed that line down to the top of the inner-thigh.
I used the same technique around the butt to highlight the geometry there. There is no geometry for the spine or the top of the gluteal muscle, unfortunately I had to use shading to fake that geometry there, but the cheeks were separated by well-defined geometry so I used that to get the curvature of the bottom looking right. You can see obvious circular shapes for the cheeks. The lower part of the circular shading was difficult as that went into low-accuracy UVs (there's still a few stray pixels there as a result).
I kept to the geometry to shade the lower part of the cheeks and followed that shading underneath and round to the front. I treated the light source as if it was coming down from above the model. A lot of colour gradients are here, which is the style of the rest of the model's texture.
Finalising
This was all made with the skirt mesh deleted, so it looked correct if the character was running around with no skirt on. I had to correct the overall texture for the ambient lighting of when the skirt mesh is present (which is why the texture looks sun-burnt in the images).
I looked at the original gradient for when the texture was black and looked at how the gradient was changing there. I matched the same location for the start of the gradient and darkened all the skin above that area. I avoided re-shading the underpants as too much of the colour information would have been lost and they'd end up looking pink/blue/grey in colour rather than white.
Conclusion
This made me realise that I am pretty capable of making passable texture modifications to models. I expected this experiment to utterly fail as this is my first texture modification on a humanoid model.
The hundreds of Minecraft skins I made has certainly taught me about ambient lighting and doing what looks-best for textures that have baked lighting, without that experience I would not have had the shading correct, especially where the skin meets at the top of the inner-thigh.
Additionally, the UV map around this area was terrible. Where it was sparse, I had difficulty aligning and finding curvature. Where it was dense, my mistakes were hidden so were difficult to track. It did show me that having a crap UV doesn't mean the texture will end up crap. With my own models, I've stressed over the UV mapping a lot; now I can stress less and put-up-with terrible UV unwraps.
The low resolution of the original model was infuriating, but justified as originally this area of texture was solid black. I can blame 90% of the issues in this texture work on the low resolution.