About this image

In the previous version the male normal map was very rough. It's smoother now.

Short article about what the project is about


More technical details with tips for mending neck, wrist, shoulder and ankle seams

I'm overhauling all default body, head and equipment textures/meshes for all default races.

Textures for HGEC/Exnem and Robert's male body are used as base which I convert to the texture layout of the default body. I remove possible texture seams with Blender's clone brush. It works better when the meshes are joined at the seam and the UV layouts share only one texture (note: I use a copy of my actual body file where I do the texture edits). I made for example for the upperbody and hand a temporary texture with a resolution 1024x1024 pixels. I pasted the exported upperbody UV map to the upper half of the texture and the hand UV map to the bottom half. Then I moved the UV section of the upperbody to the new location on the texture and resized it so it lines up with the lines of the image of the edited UV map; I did the same with the hand UV section. After that I created another 1020x1024 texture in Gimp and pasted the actual upperbody texture to the upper half and the hand texture to the bottom half. I assigned this texture to the joined mesh and concealed the texture seams with the clone brush but without the "Clone from Paint Slot" option. The final step was dividing the combined upperbody/hand texture into two textures with a resolution of 1024x512 pixels.

The (mesh) neck seam was eliminated with my socket method, the other mesh seams (shoulder, wrists) with the Seam Mender script (part of Room207's Blender Portable version). Regarding the Seam Mender, I wrote a small guide here (it works for the wrist and shoulder seams as well). The ankle seams are a special case. Somehow the Seam Mender messes the normals of the feet up after applying the script. The only way to remove them was the manipulation of the normals like I did with the neck. But I only selected the normals at the seam of both the legs and the feet and transferred the normal data of the seam area between them (is enough to transfer the normal data in only one direction, i. e. from leg to feet and then export the modifed feet according to the steps I described in my socket method walkthrough).