Naruto: Naiteki Kensei Mod for Half-Life Friday update #14 news

Welcome to Friday Update #14!

We should rename this to weekend update or something...

We've been having alot of fun showing what our mod is going to be like when you get your grubby little hands on it. For the next couple of weeks we thought that we'd give you a little more in-depth look on what goes on behind the scenes and how we actually make the mod. This week we decided to start off with our Texturing department.

   

Texturing a character is a very important part of game design. A good texture can make or break the mesh it's applied to. An engine like half-life has limits in how high poly and detailed the mesh itself can be, so alot of the detail relies on the texture of that mesh. A good texture artist should be able to skin on little details and have them look just as good as if they had been modelled on adding a high level of detail to where there previously was none.

But I get ahead of myself. The first step to a good skin is a good skinmap. What's a skinmap? Well think of it this way. Remember in grade school when you had those pieces of paper with shapes that you cut out and then folded into 3-D cubes and triangles? Skinmapping is doing the exact opposite of that. We take a 3-D object, and then 'unwrap' it so that it's laid out flat on a surface that makes it alot easier for us to draw on.

    

So now you have your most important pieces done. It's time to move onto texturing. The biggest mistake that texture artists just starting out have is that they find a reference that they like and then use it to skin their model. When texturing it's important to find at least 5 different references of your character, because depending on the angle or artist drawing that character they will more than likely look different.

In the first example above you can see two pictures of Sakura's face. Each picture has decidedly different eyestyles but both are of the same character. The job of the texture artist is to take both of this refs (and any more they may be able to find) and find a happy medium that always conveys the character no matter what angle they are being viewed at.

Texturing a body in an engine like half-life is also a challenge. You have to skin the mesh in such a way that lighting will always be properly hitting it. Usually the best way to do this is just to set the light source above the mesh, and ingame it comes out nicely. Remember to skin on smaller items that wouldn't need to be modelled, as outlined in the second example.

The rest is up to practice and keeping at it. If you're looking to get seriously involved in the texturing scene search up on google for some real tutorials, and not just a rough break down of what I did here, best of luck to all of you!

Stay tuned for even more updates next week!

- The NNK Team