All characters 1.1 update blog - Tristikov

Having gained some experience and insight over the course of building more character models for UT3, I did an across the board update to all of my character models with the aim of standardizing seams for compatible parts. Not all parts are universally compatible due to specific body shapes, but most regular shirts and coats of the same materials should fit together without gaps now. There were also a few miscellaneous rigging issues that I fixed or improved on.

I suspected that having the specular and specular gloss maps also at 2048x2048 was eating up file size without actually contributing to texture quality, so I reduced them to 1024x1024, saving much in file size and not reducing quality as far as I can tell. I also ran a sharpen filter over all of the exported maps which seems was an easy way to increase fidelity. Lastly, I added some extra detail to the normal maps of all characters, making subtle but hopefully noticeable improvements to how they are lit. 

At some point in the future I would still like to go back and re-unwrap my older models to use more efficient UVWs and achieve the higher texture resolution of the newer models, but I think that I will probably end up making at least 2 more characters first before I start doing any major renovations.