Ok, I’m working on a torque project and I’m using Blender as my modeler. Now I’ve come across kind of a texturing dilemma. Some of it is my fault, some it it is simply a limitation of blender that I have to work around.
Attached are a few copies of a model I’m working on. The actual mesh looks great, and I’m happy with it. Sadly, when I start adding details and texturing the model, things tend to start looking odd and really bad. I need some tips on texturing so that I can make her look right.
The first picture is the body mesh from blender. You can see it looks OK, but when I put a texture on it I run into some some issues. First Blender doesn’t seem to support lighting when you have it it texture mode. This makes it imposable to do any real light checking with a UV map. Also, texture mode does not support alpha maps either. I work around this by exporting the model into Torque’s model viewer (Showtool) so I can see what it really looks like.
It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to texture the face right. I’m having difficulties figuring out what looks “weird” about the model and how to fix it. I can’t tell if it’s a mesh issue or a texture issue. I also can’t fix both at the same time because of Blender’s limitations above. There is a lot of exporting and reloading of Blender to check my model and UV maps. I can’t just reload a UV map, because Blender can’t seem to delete the old one. Blender put numbers like .001 and .002 in the filename screwing up the export process,. The exporter that requires the exact filename as the material name. I have to close blender and start it again to “flush” the unused materials.
Is there more efficient ways to work around these limitations? Also, for the real reason why I came here, do you guys know what I can do to make the textures look better. I’m going to a garage-kit kind of look, which requires the shadows and highlights to be painted on the model. I’m not toonshading it. The example of the art I’m shooting for is posted as the 3rd picture (From Grandia 3)
What can you guys offer?
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