Andrew’s Model
Andrew passed me along a really lovely model for Tato so I was able to just jump straight in with the texturing.
Character Research
Of course, some potato research was necessary and so I created a reference board of spuds as well as going through out pinterest board of different characters that we felt captured the essence of what Tato should be like.
Taking him into substance
The initial potato design that I painted up in substance was upon review, very detailed and seemed too green in tone. Andrew showed me his previous character designs in which the character was much brighter and was much more visually appealing.
Feedback (Not cartoony enough)
The strong yellow proved to be much more aesthetically pleasing and when compared the old texture looked ghoulish! I carefull drew on some little dents and blemishes onto his skin, and took care to keep some darker, flakey looking patches like on real potatos. By now I knew that we would be using the cel shader and so avoided spending too much more time on the normal maps. We had spoken about each character having blue celtic warpaint, to show their unity with eachother and their ferocitity as a team. For Tato, I didn;t want to place this somewhere that would effect the eyes and so my choices were either forehead or below the chin. Puca also has his blue paint on his chin so it felt appropriate.
After this I quickly rendered him out in his new style. It was wonderful to see him start to come to life and all our hard work paying off.
The Props
For the characters Props I knew it was my task to both model and texture them. This meant that I had to plan out how they were going to look, based off andrew’s previous designs.
THE SHIELD
As Tato is a very small character I thought it would be funny if the object he uses as a shield is a little button. The juxtaposition of this should hopefully be funny. I kept the celtic blue colour theme going as well, with a nice swirl on the material.
THE SASH AND SATCHEL
Tato’s little bag is supposed to look like it was specially made for him. It is based of similarly styled medieval satchels and should fit into our fantasy time period nicely.
THE SWORD
Tato’s sword is a little piece of metal attached to two small sticks. The handmade feel is something I really wanted to capture for this design.
With CEL Shader plugin
Kerry McCormick 