The Electric Gorilla: Character Creation: Duck-Billed Platypus Part 2

By Stuart Brown

The platypus model was unfortunately not quite finished before Meg went to Germany, this was because for a unknown reason, the model didn't seem to work on her laptop, forcing all work for it having to be done in college.

I started with giving the character a mouth, as in the story boards he requires it. I made two edge loops in the centre of the mouth, and deleted the faces between them, and the patched them up by adding faces horizontally to make the roof and bottom of a mouth. I then started looking at the UV map. I was left partially done and unwrapped, apart from the feet, beak, bottom of the tail and torso. The edges also need sew the UV together

I then unwrapped the necessary areas and stitched the UV's. I re projected the feet from a different angle as the current ones didn't work. Then, I placed all the UV's into the square creating this look.

The next part of this, was texturing this UV. I exported a UV snap shot and placed it into Photoshop. I pressed command I to invert it, and placed it on the blend mode multiply. The first thing I did, was colour the basic colours on the texture.

I then used different brushes to create different textures. Some gave a furry effect I used, and some gave a dotted texture I used for the more duck like grey features to give a look resembling pours in the skin. I spent a quite a bit of time re looking and images of Platypus' to get the right texture but still making him look cartoon like. The last was a rough texture for the cotton. I used different shades of the basic colours to give him more variation.

I then added a thick black line around certain areas to make him look more cartoon like and comic styled, also bearing in mind how the environment was textured so he will fit in nicely.

I placed this on the character, and noticed some problems, most noticeably on the head band, where the soft preview (which we want the characters to be in) is different to the other UV, which made his head band look like it was melting onto his head.

I then fixed this problem by exporting a new UV snapshot of the soft preview UV and working around that. This fixed the issue.

The last stage was to add his markings. This was easier than I thought it would be. I simply drew them on a new layer with a white normal brush, double clicked the layer and gave it a black this stroke effect. I then put the craquelure texture on via filter gallery, altered with the settings so it looked how I wanted, and placed it on. When doing this, I thought of my inspiration for the character which was much of Tonto from the lone ranger, and gave the markings a similar texture to how his face make up looks.