Process: Shading Templates

This is a custom shading reference for clothing folds and shadows; it hasn't been applied to any actual pieces of clothing yet.

I don't even want to say how very, very LONG this took. The program in the top screenshots is AvPainter, supposedly a program that lets you paint directly on the 3-D model. However, the controls are so horrifically shoddy that it's much nicer to do the painting in Photoshop. Thus the bottom screenshots. That's what the flat texture looks like (they're each 1024 square, I moved them around and overlaid to save space.)

This means that every minute or so I have to save the image file and flatten the layers into a .tga, go to AvPainter, open up the textures and layers window, and re-open the .tga (there's no refresh feature). This gets especially frustrating when it comes to matching up "seams", which are the breaks that separate the top from the bottom, the front from the back, and the torso from the arms. You practically have to do it a few pixels at a time.... on a 1024 pixel square image for the top and bottom each. It was literally days before I finished all the seam matching and shading.

There has GOT to be a better way to do this.

ANyway, as you can see I've completed a basic shading template for both a regular-length shirt and a tunic-length top. I also have rudimentary shading for something resembling leggings; I'll make a pants version later.  These shading templates will be used to make the design process for future outfits hopefully a little easier for me, so that I can focus less on matching up the same shading seams over and over again, and more on making quality original designs.

Cheers!
~Gryph
GryphonWings Designs