Chapter1: Eyes

To make the eye texture I looked on the internet for a marble texture, because from looking at Mantis's you can see there eyes have various sorts of patterns on them.

Ok, so this image was the original texture of the eye seen in the early texturing stage of blinky. So, with this marble texture image I stuck it in photoshop and created two additional layers, one layer was for a colour fill over the top of the marble texture. I filled the layer in with a colour of my choice then reduced the opacity. I did also slightly adjust the marble texture itself using the hue/saturation option and tweaking around in that. The last layer on top of that was just the pupil of the mantis's eye which i quickly made using the oval tool, I placed the oval as central as I could. Close up the pupil does look a little bit crude but I wasn't too bothered because the final render won't be a close up on Blinky's face. So I then created a material in MAX with this image and then tweaked it a bit using the UVW Map node, if I remember correctly I didn't tamper with the mapping on this one, just kept it on the default because I was happy with how it looked.

After putting on the texture, I really wasn't happy with how it looked on Blinky (these images can be seen in the previous post) so I did a few mock up renders with different colourings to the eye. This was done quite simply with changing the colour fill layer and tweaking the opacity according to how I wanted it and saving them as different JPEGS so I could just swap between them in the material editor in MAX, this method in doing this proved to be a major time saver, the following beneath show the different mock ups.




From doing these eye renders, I was really happy with how the red eye for Blinky looked and also this was more the kind of mantis look I wanted to texture, as a loose reference guide I used this pic from this stage on to get the jist of roughly how Blinky will turn out.

So from looking at this imagery, I found that the wingcasing and thorax casing will have to be a richer looking green. Although I know that in this image the mantis's eyes are more of a nutty brown colour than a red, but screw it! I was happy with Blinky's eyes being red!

The underneath images are the final JPEG texture of Blinky's eyes and what i used for the bump mapping (although there wasn't too much point in bump mapping the eyes, but there we go!).



So from moaning and grumbling at the wingcasing texture not looking right, the next post will continue onto the next chapter in Blinky's texturing process.... The wingcasing and thorax casing texture!