Airport lounge #1 – textures

Written by Helen Jackson.

How do we get from the computer model on the left to the airport lounge on the right?

Regular readers will know the answer has to do with “textures” and lighting. Let’s start with textures. Every object in the computer model has to have a material, or texture, applied to it.

The easiest objects to deal with are those that are one solid colour. Anything that isn’t a single colour needs a texture map of some sort. Texture maps can add colours, patterns, transparency, depth, shininess, or any number of other properties.

There aren’t very many objects in the airport, so we can look at the texture maps for them all. Kyle is the most complicated – he has to be unwrapped, giving a flat image file that can be edited. Weird, isn't it?!

The plane is mostly white, but it needs a texture map for the branding and the windows. The glass is similar – mostly transparent, but with a texture map to make the translucent lettering (by the way, the real-life airport at Cedar Rapids is called the "Eastern" Iowa Airport, but “Easter” seemed more appropriate for this time of year!). The seats have perforations.

Are you interested in this technical “making of…” stuff? I’m planning to do a fair bit of it this week – we’re spending a lot of time working on these details, so it seems only fair to tell you about it. You're part of the team, after all.

But, I don’t want to bore you to death. Let me know if you’re fascinated, or if you’re losing the will to live.

Comments

[Kiwi]

Hi Helen

Flat Kyle's hands are freaky, but flat Aileen seems to have had her fingers broken!

It is really easier to edit the characters when they are in a flat sheet?, I would have thought facial expressions would have been hard to get right in 2D.

[Kiwi]

Hello, I find this very interest...although flat Kyle looks like the stuff of nightmares (flayed skin and all). What are the yellow lines by his flayed hair?

I can't wait for the next episode.

[Helen]

It's his funny little double hands (the back and front of each hand, linked at the wrist) that freak me out. The yellow lines are also hair - they're the edge of his hair.

Have you seen flat Aileen and flat Watson?

[Helen]

I'm not sure "easy" is a word I'd use! Working on the unwrapped textures involves a lot of trial and error: edit the image, look at it on the model, change the image, look at it on the model...

But, it's the only way.

The facial expressions are dealt with in the 3D model, rather than in the textures. So, all we're doing is colouring in, and that's best done in 2D. You can probably see what I mean on the Aileen model - the texture map adds things like freckles, but doesn't change the expression.

In The Lost Book our characters are basically doll-like, in that they don't have facial expressions or move their mouths when they speak. This is purely because of time - we're on such a tight schedule that lip-synching isn't an option. But, if we were going to include these movements we'd "rig" the models so that all facial expressions were dealt with by the animator in 3D.