MILITARY GUY TEXTURING PART 1 - baby steps

The fun part starts now. The most pleasing moment of the character creation from scratch is the moment when everything is finally working.

On sculpting phase even when the sculpt is done - you are still aware how much stuff is there still to do and figure out, such as: retopology, colorIDs, exporting correct parts to bake, making sure symmetrical parts match, then retopo then UV-ing, then baking and tons of minor little issues to fix.

But now is the moment of truth, where the character finally takes it's final form through colors and texturing. And this is the finish line - which gives me a pure joy.

So we have this guy in Substance Painter, as you can see it's fully baked and ready to be painted on. We can do whatever we want with it. And it is the most fun but also the most decisive part.

military dude is fully baked and looks great, all the baking issues are fixed

But before that - Let me tell you who this character is

The origin of this character lies in my dream animation project called "Aeon's Paradise" - it's a cartoony stylized project with some cute characters but also with creepy monsters and other major enemies such as military forces.

This is the cover art I drawn for the cartoon when I initially came up with the idea.

First cover art for Aeon's Paradise

See those two guys in the back on the left side of the artwork?

These are exactly the military dude model that we are about to texture :)

And here's a little initial sketch I did when I was figuring out what I want it to look like. It's not as stylized as the main character, but for some reason I did not want these evil military forces to look too stylized with big chibi heads wobbling around, I wanted a bit more serious and faceless look. I am hoping this decision will not backfire.

I think I did this sketch in Photoshop

And here's my PureRef board where I collected all the other tactical soldiers I liked from the web. As you can see Metal Gear Solid, Wolf Brigade and Wolfenstein franchises played a big role in my inspiration.

Now you know how and why I started making this character and what role will it have in my universe.

So let's get to texturing!

Today we will cover only the very basic coloring as proper texturing takes time.

The very first thing I do is painting the whole model just dark grey - it will serve us as a primer that will conceal all the little mistakes we may down the road.

Now let's paint the very first thing I had invisioned - A red metal mask

Concept did change since my initial sketch, I think I have re-sculpted this gasmask like 20 times before finally finding this design. And yes, I wanted it to be red.

Another little fun thing I tried is adding little glowing crosses in eye cavities, not sure If I will keep these. What do you think?

As any sane person out there - I start color filling the big shapes by using "Color Fill" with a Paint assigned to layer's mask. Sometimes I use ColorID, but this character has lots of separate object so I just paint by geometry.

Now the moment of truth - the initial colors

Option 1 - Darker Cloth, Lighter Armor

The problem is that there are many different cool color combinations

Option 2 - Lighter Cloth, Darker Armor

I could even loose the dark aesthetic and make this guy painted white and red

There are so many different options, sometimes it's unbearable. I still think the safest read is to simply stick to the plan, because I had this guy in my imagination for such a long time - at this point I kind of got married to it's dark aesthetic so I will most probably stick to the sketch, but I still can't choose between Option 1 and Option 2.

What option do you prefer? Write in the comments!

We will continue coloring and texturing in the next post.

As usual - take care and enjoy your craft.