Fan art of the Loose Cannon from Team Fortress 2, one of the weapons used by the demoman.
For this project I ventured into the style of fully hand painted textures and lighting. I have dabbled on this style before but not to this level, so it was a big learning experience.
My workflow was to first model the highpoly model with all the details. Then I made a lowpoly version and UV unwrapped it by keeping each part grouped and aligned to make painting easier.
To start texturing I first set the base color for each part and baked the lighting from Cycles to work as a base for painting. For baking the lighting the lowpoly mesh used a normal map baked from the highpoly version, so that all the details would be captured by the lighting.
I painted the model in Krita, gradually adding patterns to the wood, painting extra reflections and overlaying curvature and AO maps for detail. It was really important to always check the grayscale values and to preview it in blender to see what needed to be worked on. I also used an ID map to quickly mask parts of the texture.
If you like TF2 maybe you should check this https://tfsource2.com/ . A group of fans is moving TF2 on Source 2 engine. Maybe you want to contribute models?
Instantly brings me back to Dustbowl =D
