“By George, she’s got it!”

UV-mapping. After taking a week out to finish the first draft of my dissertation, it was back to uv-mapping and texturing the New Orleans town environment for ‘Krokodi’. Not really something I have been enjoying immensely, maybe because I am eager to do more work for my main two specialisms, rigging and animation, but the town environment needs finished! And now that a bit of colour is starting to seep it's way onto the buildings, it's starting to look a bit more exciting :) 

I had so much trouble getting my head around the process of uv-mapping, and then, during the weekend of week 7, after days and days of uv-mapping confusion, I had "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain"* moment, UV-mapping seemed to click in my head! That same weekend I managed to finish off the majority of the town props. 

After that I started on the buildings in the town. I have established a work-flow and naming convention system so I don't get confused with all the texture files I'm creating, colour-coded the rows of buildings and have also added each row of building onto a separate layer within MAYA, so that I can switch the visibility on and off, in order to not have too many fully textured objects visible in MAYA at the same time, as I have found from past experience that this slows down MAYA, or even prevents the file from opening at all.

Colour-coded and numbered buildings

Just trying to whizz through it all as quickly and efficiently as I can at the moment to keep our film production on track. :)

A more detailed insight into the last few weeks, and about the uv-mapping and texturing process of the New Orleans town environment can be seen over at the film's blog, just copy and paste the link:
http://krokodi.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/an-update-of-past-few-weeks.html

*'My Fair Lady' film quote