Metal walkway progress

My other task set for this module for the coming weeks was to make a metal walkway, again tile-able. I started off with a galvanized steel texture. It's quite plain but I removed some of the more stand out areas of by using a High Pass Filter on it.

I then made it tile by again using the offset filter on it to see the joins of the texture. It didn't require much work to fix, just a little brush work along with the clone stamp tool.

This is the first of 3 variants of the texture. It has metal grips on it that would prevent slipping. These were made using the marquee tool, brush tool, drop shadow layer effect and playing with the opacity and fill settings of the layer. I struggled to get them to line up properly and tile for a while but using the grid I eventually got a decent result. The reason for such a clean texture is that it will be tiled many times meaning that any dirt or scratches could easily be noticed when repeated. 

This is the second variant. Just some simple warning stripes along the side where it would meet the wall. I used a layer mask to add some scratches to it to make it a little more interesting alongside some dirt where it meets the wall. It will tile fine but I am a little worried that the scratches could be noticed repeating. 

This is the 3rd and final variant. It is the variant that would be situated in the center of the hall. It's pretty simple, it has the base texture flipped from the center so that it can tile both ways on the hallway (the other variants would have to be flipped. The detail is quite simple, it has a large galvanized steel overlay on the green painted area, darker paint in the center area, simple scratches done through a layer mask and the large black areas will have alpha maps applied to make it see through which would show a lower area, possibly with lights in. 

This is the alpha map. White information is visible whilst black isn't there so just the black areas will be removed. 

For this assignment I still need to make normal maps of all three of these and probably a specular map but then I'll simply apply it on some planes and it will be done. 

UPDATE

So I made the specular maps for all 3 variants along with normal maps which still need to be normalized next week in the computer labs. My first specular is pretty straight forward, shiny metal.

Here the painted areas aren't going to shine as much and neither would the dirt. I have kept the scratches there since they would shine but otherwise the same as the first. 

Yet again much the same, the middle area is coloured and so wouldn't shine as much. The black areas are being alpha mapped so wouldn't have any shine and the darker area is in a recess so wouldn't catch so much light. Scratches kept in again.

Here's my first normal map for the standard texture and variant 1 since the paint won't change the normal map. It obviously needed to be added to so that's what I did.

Here is the next version of the normal map that still needs to be normalized. It's very simple, yet hopefully very effective. 

The original version of my variant 3 texture's normal map. Needed adding too.

I layered it up using gaussian blur and overlayed duplicates of it. It's simple but hopefully very nice.

Seamless brick texture progress

This week one of the tasks I was set for this module was to make a seamless brick texture including normal and specular maps. My first task was to find a good image of some bricks to work from. I ended up picking this image because I thought it was a good image despite the white markings on it which would be obvious if tiled.

I then rotated the image, cropped it in the best place in a square shape and used the offset filter making the texture split into 4 so that I could make sure it was completely tile-able. 

From there I used the clone stamp tool along with low opacity black and grey brushes to make the whole texture tile-able. This mean making sure all the cracks had a more similar colour, creating new bricks with the clone stamp and ensuring there was a similar shade of brick throughout so that it would seem natural. 

I then went over the cracks with a mid grey brush on a new layer which I then converted to a multiply, darkening the cracks and increasing the contrast which would make the bricks stick out more on the final texture.

I then added a small surface blur to the image. This was so that I could use a height to normal map filter in Xnormals to make a basic normal map from it. I had a little trouble getting this right as some of the white specks on the bricks were staying very prominent on the normal map. 

This is the normal map I ended up with. It's still very noisey and I think that I may likely redo it yet it worked out anyway. 

I then duplicated the layer, applied a small gausian filter to the layer and set it to overlay. After this I made many copies of it to increase the strength of the map. This highlights the problematic noise even more though, hence why I will probably redo it. I need to normalize the map in this state however I cannot get the right filters on my computer at home and so I will have to wait until next week to go into the computer labs to completely finish this step.

Below is the specular map I made from the diffuse map. I think this has came out well and will look good on the final result. I don't know whether I chose the greatest original texture for this task but I will update this post as I go. 

UPDATE

Below you can see my updated normals and blurred image that helped produce them. I decided to blur the image a lot more this time until you couldn't really see much detail at all apart from the difference between the bricks and the cracks between them. This came out a lot better on my normals. 

This is my base normal map to work from. It is a lot cleaner than my original. I think this map will work really nicely and look forward to being able to finish the project next week. 

My layered normal map doesn't look pretty but does look quite a bit like my lecturers example map which I figure must be a good thing. All in all I feel more confident about this map. 

Futuristic cube perspective render and turnaround video

So just another render and a turnaround video for my cube as well, no changes to the project but I'm very happy with it. The render is done in Marmoset Toolbag. 

Finished Cube

So this is my final render of the finished cube. Since last time I have updated the diffuse a lot along with adding some details to the normal map and creating a unique specular map. I enjoyed the little project a lot and learnt quite a bit about both baking normal maps and specular maps along with becoming more and more confident in my texturing abilities. 

Futuristic cube - Xnormal version

This is my Xnormal cube with all the maps on it. Once again it is rendered in Maya Hardware as any of the others mess with the map. Weirdly, the Xnormal map doesn't show any artifacts whilst the Maya created maps did. I think I may have made some mistake with those normals but I'll talk to my teacher on Monday. Anyway, Xnormal cube. 

Futuristic cube diffuse in Maya

So this is the diffuse, normal and AO maps all rendered together in Maya using the Maya Hardware renderer. Ordinarily I would use mental ray for beauty renders yet for some reason that was making the normals appear similar to the normals from Xnormals, I'm going to do some research soon and see if it is just a problem with my normal maps. As you can see on the right face there is a small artifact in the normal so it could be wrong but I don't have enough experience with them to be sure. Anyway the diffuse itself is pretty simple, being futuristic I imagine them having quite simple, efficient designs for things so I kept to squared shapes for the most part and had a small colour pallet. I also kept to quite bright colours, I don't know why but that is what I associate with future colours. 

Futuristic Cube - Ambient occlusion maps

So I just finished making, applying and rendering the AO maps onto my two cubes, the top Maya textures, the bottom Xnormals. Again it is rendered in Maya giving the textures made with it more suitability for the software. The Maya AO worked really well and looks great with no errors that I can see. The Xnormals one has a few issues such as the corner bolts and darkening around the edges. The edges are to do with the normal map as the AO is clean but the bolts have rendered out black, I don't know why that is yet but I plan to do a little research into Xnormals later to see if I am doing anything wrong. Next will be the diffuse map which I will then put on both cubes and see how they look. 

UPDATE

Following this I looked at Xnormals again and read the small warning message that popped up when I started rendering out maps. It said the high definition mesh had a small scale or something similar. After searching the internet I found a fix for the issue which was simply increasing the size of both meshes before you export them as FBX's. Here is the updated cube. As you can see the edges still have weird streaks because of the normal map but the whole AO is a lot cleaner and matches up better with the normal. Also the bolts on the corners are no longer black which is a big plus. However one of them did remain black, possibly I didn't scale the model enough? I will ask my lecturer on Monday but I shall leave the error for now as 3 of them are fine and you can see the final results of what Xnormals can do. 

Futuristic Cube - Normal Maps

This week we were set the task of unwrapping and giving normal, ambient occlusion and diffuse maps to a pre-built cube which also a had a high polygon model provided. So far I have unwrapped it, challenging but doable, and made 2 normal maps for it. The first is done through Transfer Maps in Maya (the above image) and the second through Xnormals (the below image). The reason for 2 different maps is that Maya renders normal maps differently to certain software and game engines (e.g. 3DStudio Max and UDK) whilst Xnormals is more commonly used in the industry. These renders are done in Maya and you can see that the Maya normal has worked perfectly whilst Xnormals normal map has smears across it. That is only because of the way Maya reads the maps. I had hoped to get renders of the cubes in UDK yet I am having issues making them work correctly in the software, I plan to do that once I've been told about the issue next week. Next I will create the AO map and then possibly the diffuse today if I have time.