Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Placing Texture Elements

Using the character’s reference images to see where to place the basic texture elements, start painting over the 3D character. This time, the reference images are not the ones in the background of the 3D View (by the way, at this point you can turn them off in the Properties Region inside the Background Images panel), but you can divide your interface to have a UV/Image Editor display them. If you happen to have a second monitor, you can use it to see the references at all times without having to use up space in your main workspace. When you have all the basic texture elements in place (see Figure 9.2), you will need to save the image so you can keep working on it in 2D software.

Figure 9.2 The positions of the basic ...