The second volume of our Caveman series covers UV mapping and texturing for organic characters in Lightwave. Here you'll learn how to lay out proper UV's to prevent stretching and overlapping in your textures, skin shading and techniques for both procedural texturing and hand painting your textures in Photoshop. We look at how to create different texture maps for color, specular and bump and apply these to our character models in Lightwave. We also cover the texturing for eyes, teeth, nails and mouth focusing on enhancing detail on a model with texture maps.
The first three parts cover the UV layout where we work in the UV texture editor and go over some different methods and tools for unwrapping UV's and creating texture maps in Lightwave. During these parts you'll learn how to get clean UV's on a model, prevent overlapping in UV maps and stretching in textures.
Parts 4 - 6 cover procedural texturing and shading. Here we look at how create a nice base for our textures and work with materials and procedural textures. We focus on getting the right flesh tones for skin and use weight maps, gradients and color swatches.
Parts 7 - 13 cover texture painting in Photoshop and getting a high level of detail in our textures. We work with the color palate, alphas, saturation and different Photoshop tools to create diffuse and specular maps, bump maps for subtle effects and to help bring our textures to life. We focus on keeping an organized work environment and by adding detail to our textures we enhance the skin wrinkles and add small imperfections to the surfaces. We also go over how to create texture maps for the eyes and the club stick, before we bring it all together in Lightwave.
This project is the second volume of our Caveman series. The Lightwave object file with the model is included with the tutorial so you can follow it as a separate project if you're only interested in learning more about UV layout and texturing, or you can follow the complete series;
