So my main areas of expertise are certainly modelling and animation. I try to keep my skills practiced with as many aspects of the CG pipeline as i can, I enjoy getting outside my comfort zone and it's an empowering feeling to be able to produce every aspect of something yourself.
Normally though I confine this to my own work so I don't feel bad in the event of my output being sub-standard. So imagine my apprehension when Marc (the director of the grad film I'm working on) asked me to do some texturing for him.
The conversation went something like this:
In reality I was worried. If my abilities fell short in this instance I would be letting down Marc and the whole film rather than just myself, added to this pressure was the fact that Marc (who, I think it is fair to say, is a damn good painter) had already texture one of the assets and my work would have to match his standard.
My first reaction was the blub like a child but instead I soldiered on, I actually had quite a bit of fun painting the textures and they came out well. It took me back to my days of creating models for half life 2.
I think I shall do more texturing in the future:
The textures were created using a combination of photo manipulation and digital painting. We wanted aspects of realism in the materials we used on the machines but still maintaining the textured element of a hand painted texture.
I decided to use a grey scale bump map rather than an RGB normal map because of time constraints, besides nobody will ever see the ship close enough to tell the difference anyway.
-Ash