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.