[Figure 27] (top) The side view of the bird. [Figure 28] (middle) The side projection view of the bird with cloned textures. [Figure 29] (bottom) A hawk’s feet being used for the owl’s feet.

The Side View
The side view (Figure 27) shows different challenges than the face and top views. In this section, the legs of the bird need to be addressed, as well as the side of the body.

1. The barn owl has a light spotted underbelly — a very different color than its topside. An area of this lighter underside can be cloned from one of the photographic reference images and used to fill in the underside (Figure 28).

2. Next, texture the feet. The feet on this owl are a yellowish color that blended about halfway down the owl’s white spotted feathers. Using a close-up image of a hawk’s feet, the feet of the owl are created using the photographic reference of the owl as a guide for color and placement (Figure 29).

Creating these images using this technique may seem like a lot of trouble to go through if there is a 3D paint program available. However, if these images are accurately and cleanly created in 2D using Photoshop before projecting them as 3D textures, this process should save time in the long run. The blending and painting done in most 3D paint programs do not give the textures the kind of color and detail consistency that can be achieved using this technique.

The model will be imported into Deep Paint for 3D texture projection. There are options available for importing the model into Deep Paint from Maya. Deep Paint has a great plug-in that can be used to import the model and textures from Maya into Deep Paint. This plug-in creates a special texture node that loads multiple image-based texture files into a single texture node. The process of loading many image-based texture images with very cryptic names into Maya for rendering is made easy and seamless. But, if there is a need to access the individual texture images, these complex texture nodes created by Deep Paint are difficult to extract specific data from. This process can either save a lot of time or cause confusion depending on the final requirement. For the purposes of this tutorial, the Maya plug-in for Deep Paint will not be used.