Finished face paint

I finished the paint over of my head today. I'm really happy with how it came out and found that Zbrush is actually a lot of fun whilst having a lot of functionality. I ended up adding some new ideas to my paint over but kept to the original plan for the most part. I added a lot of burnt skin to him as it just ended up working really well. Below are some of the textures I used for Spotlight painting. Next I need to UV map the head and get it onto a low poly version eventually.

Front

Perspective

Side

Lizard Skin

I used this along with another non-gradient version for the base skin colour and texture of the head. It is a simple image with a gradient on the colour layer style. 

Bone

This was my first bone texture for the teeth and neck bone. This is simply an image with a multiply layer and duplicated it all using the overlay style.

Bone2

This was my second bone texture, used for the aliens crown. I used a colour overlay and my previous version in combination with a new image to create this.

Gums

This is literally a slab of meat I used for the gums. I then edited it in Zbrush.

Jellyfish 

This is a beached jellyfish which I used for the warty areas on the side of the aliens head. I added a red colour overlay, used levels to get rid of some highlights and added detail with the brush tool.

Rotting Flesh

This is an an image of a plastic bag that was heated up a lot. I used a multiply layer, colour layer and overlay to make this. 

Finished door

I finished off my door today. This is the finished diffuse, normal and specular maps. The diffuse had just a bit more editing done to it since last time. The normal map was done quite easily too, using my previous map in combination with diffuse maps which I changed to normal maps which were then normalized and overlayed. The spec was just edited from the diffuse map and was done pretty easily.

Here are two maya renders of my door. 

And the two renders I did in Marmoset. 

Cottage door

I started an assignment this week which involves texturing an entire supplied cottage (very similar style to fable cottages). The first thing I did was normal map the cottage. This was problematic for quite a while as I didn't know about the unlock normals tool. However once shown this I finished the task quickly.

After the normal map I made an AO map which whilst not baking all that much information certainly gave enough for me to work with, any areas I wasn't happy with I went and quickly painted in.

When working on the diffuse, my first attempt ended up being a very washed out door made from driftwood. Whilst I liked the look of it, it was a bit dull and the cottage looks like it's from Fable, not exactly the right scenario to use this kind of texture in.

Following this I made a brighter more fitting diffuse. I added old metal hinges and door handle along with celtic patterns along the arch and the pillars for decoration and a slight fantasy feel.

And here's the door whilst still missing more normal mapped details which I can't do yet (need to use another computer for converting normal maps) and the specular map. I'm really happy with it so far and hope I can get the normal map working really well.

Textures applied

I finally got to apply my tiling textures. For the most part I got really good results which I'm happy with but there are a few issues with some of the maps which I'll talk about now. 

This is my bricks on a plane. This worked really well in my opinion, tiling well and looking very 3D. There are a few bricks which noticeably repeat which I will be wary of on future projects. 

Here's the brick texture on a cube, much the same though you can see more of the specular map working here. It looks nice, tiles well and I'm really happy with it.

This is my standard metal texture tiled. I'm quite happy with it but there is a slight colour change where it tiles. However having looked at it from a FPS camera, you wouldn't really notice it without actively looking for mistakes. In future I would take more time on the textures too.

My 3 variants of the metal texture together. From this angle it looks pretty good but there a few issues I'll explain with the next image. 

As you can see here, these don't tile perfectly. Some colour issues are prevalent around the edges of the tiles along with the grips themselves not fitting onto the textures perfectly.  

Overall, I've learnt a lot from this task and it will really help in the future. Next time I make a tile-able texture, I will do a few things. The first will be to have a more thorough check of how well it tiles. It shows that I spent more time on the brick texture than the metal one. The second would be that I would be to check if there are any more noticeable areas of the texture that could be noticed when tiled, such as on my brick texture. And my third thing is to think of how big the textures should be. Spending so much time on small details that won't necessarily be seen much isn't smart when time could be put into more attention grabbing parts of a scene.

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. 

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.