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Thinking
Outside the Box:
By Paul "Villam" Steed
Her hips are separate and present the most challenge during animation since I want her to appear as if she's wearing a skintight body suit. Again, the offset tool in Photoshop is the single most important tool when ensuring a texture will tile. Learn it. Live it. Be that filter. The legs are a bit tricky...
...but after using some scaling and turning transforms, I was able to fit the textures to the 128 x 64 texture page I have for the leg. For one arm I wanted to make it a bare, 'Rail Gun' tattoo-ed arm ala Barb Wire...
I'm going to go ahead and use the leg texture for the other arm to be different and illustrate an important mindset in today's limited texture space world of low-poly character creation: re-usability. Thas' right, Grasshopper, re-use as many textures on as many objects as you can. It allows you the ability to apply higher rez textures than ordinary and done right, doesn't become overly noticed.
I can tile any texture I want across U or V so I made a generic shoulder pad texture that tiles and can be used on other objects due to its nondescript nature. Now comes the fun part of the texturing process: UV manipulation. I have no fucking clue what U or V stands for but V is close enough for me to consider it 'vertical'. I equate U to horizontal by default association. U means sideways, V means up and down. I assign cylindrical mapping to the objects because this type of map wraps around an object. This is in contrast to planar mapping used in Quake and Q2. Check out our lovely model wearing her respective cylindrical maps (BOOMin', I tell ya):
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