Spellbook

This week we made a low polygon book. My book was 284 triangles. The idea of this was to see how to make textures for low detail models. It was made from a box with 3 segments on each side whilst the clasp was made from a cube which I extruded repeatedly. Unwrapping the model was very difficult due to the leather overlapping and joining into the page section. I ended up using a mixture of tools to unwrap it including splitting edges, manually moving vertices and the unfold option. 

Making the texture proved quite difficult. The leather was a combination of 3 types of leather which I then painted over. The writing and runes were done using bevel and emboss, outer shadow and colour overlay on some occasions. The pages were just images that I changed the levels, hue and saturation on. The clasp was a few different iron photos overlaying each other. 

This is my final book. I'm very happy with how it turned out but would like to try engraving things into the leather next time. All in all I spent around 30 minutes on modelling, an hour and a half on unwrapping and 4 and a half hours on the texture itself. 

Brief and first pieces of work

This semester I am completing the Game Texture Development module. In it I will learn a lot about the different types of textures, how to source them, the best way to create them and how to apply them. I will use Photoshop a lot and learn much about it. The final submission work is to texture a head sculpt we are given and to texture a house we have been given. Personally I think this will be a hard but rewarding module as I feel that my texture work needs to improve a lot.

Already we have done work which has taught me new things. The first piece of work we did was to create and texture a basic box. It had to be hand painted. I painted it without photo reference and learnt quite a bit in the way of pressure sensitivity regarding my graphics tablet. This is what I came out with:

I'm really happy with it and think it's a nice piece of work. I was told that the grain was a little too harsh in terms of colour which I can agree with now looking back but I still like what I did. Next we had to make our own cloud brush and create a small picture with it. This I found difficult, I really felt I couldn't get the brush to look right but in the end I created something I was quite happy with:

It was created using only my brush and the gradient tool for the background. I started by laying down a darker tone and then adding the light clouds on top. It came out better than I thought it would and am quite happy with it and have a learnt a lot. I look forward to seeing what I will learn next.