Scratch that, it's a disaster. When I finished painting it and applied it back to the model, it was incredibly distorted. I'm gonna have to UV map it a little neater. I'll make the image bigger so I don't have to worry so much about the size of each UV.
I've been watching some time-lapse videos of people painting their UVs, and I think I've got a better idea of what to do and what not to do. I'm going to bypass the baking step, for now, and paint from scratch on them. This means there will be less awkward shadows and maybe I'll be able to bake it after I've textured it.
Man, this is more difficult than I thought it would be.
So, as it turns out, the reason this is coming out so weird is because gradient colours are spread across different parts of the UV map. So, if the head was at the top and the neck was at the bottom, the gradient wouldn't work properly because the UV map is telling it to go to a completely different area, which makes parts look black and white.
The whole character is white except for the visor and the slits on the chest, so that doesn't help much. I'm gonna examine some other models and see what they do. One idea I have is to create UV maps for individual parts of the model, but I don't know yet.
So, this is the final result of hours of 3D painting and texturing.
My final word on this is that, though it's not what I wanted and I'm still not very satisfied, I have learnt an awful lot from this experience and I hope that you guys enjoyed seeing all the "progress" I made.
I'm seriously considering going in a whole new direction and basing the model more loosely on the concept art, because making a model out of nothing but a side view is extremely difficult, especially since it's an odd point of view. Working on the legs now.
Okay, I've manually UV unwrapped it, added plain colours, and now I'm going to attempt to bake it so that I can edit the UV map externally in Photoshop and add textures and all that fancy stuff. Wish me luck!
I had this really cute vision when I was having spaghetti for dinner a few days ago, of Cereza from Bayonetta playing with her food as a child, and came up with this idea of a spaghetti demon or something. Umbra Witches were probably doing stuff like this all the time when they were younger.
It didn't turn out as cute as I imagined, but nevertheless it's the first remotely decent artwork I've made in quite a while now. Hope you like!