Daily Art: Footwear UVs

March 8th:

These UVs were painful. The shoelace UVs refused to unfold.

I tried everything I could think of. I cut them into large pieces, then I cut them into tiny pieces, then I selected whole edges of UVs and lined them up by hand. Every time I hit "unfold" they snarled themselves into oblivion: each of the edges of each single section zigzagged up and down like crazy, turning areas that I knew should line up fairly evenly horizontally into sharp, erratic waves. When I straightened these waves by hand and then hit "unfold" to even out the spacing of the polygons, they would inevitably turn into waves again, but tamer waves than they had been before. The more I lined them up manually the more manageable they became whenever I unfolded them, and I finally got them to generally resemble what I knew they should look like. It took hours, though. Hours: spent on shoelaces!

It was one of the most frustrating sessions I've ever spent UVing (and that's counting the time that I was first learning to UV and had no clue tools like "unfold" existed: I used to auto-UV everything and then spend a whole lot of time stitching). It was all the more frustrating because it would have been so easy to say: "They're shoelaces. Forget the UVs. I can slap a procedural texture or two on them and they'll be fine." But I knew that I was going to take the whole model into Mudbox to texture paint it, and as long as I was texture-painting the rest of it I might as well include the shoelaces. I just wanted them done the way that I intended them to be done, so I kept at it, despite the frustration. And I won in the end. The shoelaces were successfully Uved and texture painted with color and grime.

Amber: 1  Shoelaces: 0

Daily Art: Nathan's Drawing

February 25th:

Just before Christmas of 2014 I visited my sister and let my niece and nephew each draw on a page of my cut-up sketchbook. I left it entirely up to them what they wanted to draw. My nephew, Nathan, drew a dragon and my niece drew what I can only assume is a fanciful galaxy of some sort. She wouldn't really tell me what she was drawing: just that she would make it pretty. The drawings are located somewhere between pages 30-40 of my sketchbook, so I won't officially get to them for some time, but I couldn't resist doing a bit of work on them on a day when I was thinking a lot about those kids.

My strategy regarding the pages with the kids' drawings is to leave all of their work untouched, but to do my own work on every bit of white space they left blank on the page. I want to incorporate their drawings into my own designs in a manner similar to that in which I incorporate the existing patterns on the patterned pages of my sketchbook, but with the intention of respecting the integrity of their drawings much more than I do the printed images.

My work in the above image is all of the tiny patterning set between the marker strokes in the head, arms, and torso of the dragon.

Daily Art: Mushroom

February 24th:

I have a thing about mushrooms lately. They're so whimsical without being quite as cliche as flowers. They've become one of my favorite things to doodle.

Daily Art: Lightning Bolt

February 23rd:

Another quick sketch. February wasn't an incredibly productive month art-wise: I made a lot of quick sketches during this period instead of grand projects.