Alien Head

 The zbrush alien head was perhaps the most interesting task for me personally as it really gave me the freedom to determine how the beast should look on a purely diffuse level, it harkened back to my old days painting plastic models and my gaming days with the Warhammer 40k tabletop game. There is not really much to comment on in terms of technique as I more or less stuck to the spray brush and occasionally dabbled with the colour spray brush and finally I used a cavity mask to reinforce the models shadows and really make the texture pop.

I went for a style rather remeniscent of the General Grevious character from the film Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, with the boney exoskeleton seeming to hide or guard a fleshy and more organic interior and I actually referenced images of him to get some of the finer details and skin variation to look authentic.

Finally I exported the polypaint from Zbrush as a diffuse map using a UVed low poly head in Maya, that combined with a lizard eye texture taken from the internet and a normal map created in much the same way used Xnormals it created a rather convincing looking low poly version of the high poly zbrush mesh.

Cottage part 2: Texturing Boogaloo

The cottage was more or less the real testing task of the module, it was the time when we had to put all of the skills and techniques that we had learned so far to use in creating an authentic looking Fable style cottage. Luckily enough however the low poly model that we would use was already made and UVed for us to save time. The UVs were set up in an interesting way and were overlapped often so that fewer textures needed to be created and it meant that the entire structure could have a very high resolution to the textures. The first thing to do when texturing this monster was to create a set of normal maps that mapped the High poly detail from a provided high poly segment of the model to the low poly model.

The next step was to actually create the textures used in the cottage, to that end I first used a blank copy of the low poly house to create a series of ambient occlusion bakes in Maya to use as a layer in the diffuse texture, I then went on the internet and found several different base textures to use. Firstly I reused the wood texture from the door frame to keep consistancy throughout the model, secondly I found a decent cobbled stone texture that would do well for the base of the house and finally I used an old paper texture for the walls instead of a plaster texture. The reason for this is that I felt that the paper had a lot more detail to it while still looking fairly organic and it went well along side the wood texture. It also would produce a very nice pock marked effect when being baked into a normal map later on.

As previously stated I then began to use the base diffuse texture and bake it into a Normal map to give the wood and stone more depth, I would then overlay this normal layer on top of the existing Hi poly baked normals in order to still retain that information. I also created a fairly basic illumination map in order to give the windows signs of life from within.

At this point I had also done similar processes for the roof, however the roof acted a lot more like the corridor task and made heavy use of Tiled textures, all in all six unique textures were used for different sections of the roof. The first task was to find a tiled roof texture that looked good enough and once that was found I had to make sure that it tiled successfully. To achieve that I used the Offset tool to keep the seams clean. I also used a few other methods such as the clone tool and the blur tool to achieve the same result.

Once a few shadows and highlights were touched up the diffuse textures were assigned to different Maya materials and assigned to specific geometry to achieve the tiled effect.

Finally I created specular maps using the diffuse textures as a base and tinkering with the saturation levels and brightness of certain layers.

Cottage part 1: Door

The cottage was more or less the real testing task of the module, it was the time when we had to put all of the skills and techniques that we had learned so far to use in creating an authentic looking Fable style cottage. The first step was to texture the door to the cottage. The low poly and high poly meshes that we would use were provided for us and the first step was to create a normal map that mapped the high poly detail to the low poly model in much the same way that we did with the KR8 task.

The next step was to create the diffuse texture for the door. The most important step in this was also the first and that was finding a good wood texture. After much searching I found one that I liked, it was old but not too rotten and was very natural in that it was very uneven in its grain layout but yet still manageable. I then created an ambient occlusion bake to apply as a texture layer using Maya and began to refine the details. I found a series of celtic style pattern decals and using an overlay blending option as well as an inner shadow effect I managed to create a convincing looking carving in the wood surface. I also managed to use layer masks to create a couple of wrought iron hinges as well as a texture for the door knocker that looked convincing. Next I used these layers and flattened them into a single layer and used the Height to normals Xnormals plugin in Photoshop to create another layer to the normal map for the door, giving the wood and metal components some depth. Finally I used the base diffuse texture to create an effective specular map that created some distinction between the iron and wood textures in the lighting.

Tiled textured corridor

The tiled texture corridor was an important task as it demonstrated the power of tiling textures in a game world, and how potentially an environment can be generated from only a handful of small 512x512 textures. Firstly was the issue of creating a texture with textured effectively, to do this I created a small elipical shape and gave it an outer show that made it appear raised, I then repeated this object in an angled pattern all with equal spacing from each other and from the edge of the 512x512 texture space overlaying a base metal texture to create a sort of metal floor with an embossed tread. I then created two other variations, one with a tiling black and yellow hazard stripe along one edge, and another with a sort of grate in the centre with an alpha component to create a bit of transparency in the game world.

I then made use of the Height to Normals Xnormals plugin in Photoshop to create a normal map for the raised metal tread to give the texture some depth.

Taking the textures into Maya I created a simple set of 5 horizonal square planes all connected together and applied the three distinct textures to all of them. The centre most plane recieved the centre grate texture and the two outermost planes received the hazard strip edge. The two mid tiles recieved the same mid tile texture. Above you can see the materials I applied to the mesh in the Hypershade window.

KR8

The KR8 task was possibly the most useful task for me personally as it introduced me fully to certain aspects of the 3D Modelling process that I feel are key, namely the use of base textures and additional maps such as Normals or specular maps. It also introduced me to the relationship between high and low poly versions of the same asset. The first step in the process was to UV the low poly model, I took special care when doing this as to consider where this would place my texture seams, I did my best to keep the seams to cavities where my hope was that ambient occlusion may hide any unsightly seams.

During the texturing process I kept in mind many of the lessons I had learnt from the spellbook task and made use of photo reference to create base textures. I then overlayed block colours to acted as painted surfaces. I then applied layer masks making use of a greyscale metal texture I had found online to create a scratched and worn appearance to the paint. Finally I applied a military style decal I created from a series of images to the side of the texture to give it an authentic look. I made use of a high poly asset provided to create a normal map using a method of High poly to Low poly baking in a third party application called Xnormals. It involved plugging both of the models in .OBJ file format into the application and making use of what is known as an external cage file to control the extent to which the rays reach in order to map the surface detail. This then generated a normal map which made most of the edges of the KR8 appear smooth and beveled as well as sharpening up the low poly geometry and making it appear as a higher quality poly mesh than is actually present. Finally I used the diffuse texture to create a basic specular map by reducing the saturation of all the colours so that it effectively became a greyscale image, I then played around the levels of the flattened image until I achieved an effect that I liked.

Spellbook

The spellbook was challenging at first because it was the first time I had tried to model something so much of a more organic feel to it, that and the UVing process were definitely a valuable learning process on how to create more interesting and appealing looking props. The above book was creating using a single mesh for the book and a separate combined mesh for the clasp like device that kept the book shut.

The texturing of the book was also an interesting experiance as it was the first time I had made use of photographic reference for a texture. The cover of the book was made using a series of filters and layers on a basic old leather texture I found on the internet, one layer made use of the overlay blending option in order to make the texture appear brighter and pop a little more. Other than that there were a series of shapes using bevel and emboss effects to look as though there was more detail added to the spine of the book. I also made use of an interesting pattern image I found on the internet of embossed copper, I set that layer to overlay and gave it a slight shadow to look at though there was some interesting detail on the clasp.

TNT Crate

The first task for me was the creation and texturing of a classic crate for any game. The best way to do this was to create a single face for the crate, UV it and duplicate and rotate it eventually creating a complete box that all had overlayed UV faces, this meant that a single 512x512 could be created and each face of the crate will share the same texture.

Creating the texture for the box was fairly simple and it involved using a base colour and a series of inner and outer shadow effects to create a sort of simple ambient occlusion. Following that I used a series of brushes in photoshop combined with an outer glow to create the grain effect and texture on the planks. Following this a series of highlight and shadow touch ups we made and finally the detail of the TNT stamp on the side.