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.