Completely finished face

Today I finished all work to do with the alien head paint over. This involved baking all the details and colour values from the high poly head (in the millions of polygons) to the low poly head in Maya (6,000 polygons). Despite the massive polygon difference, their isn't too much difference when you look at the 2 heads. They both look great and I'm really happy with my work. I created a number of maps for the head but most were done through just using the low and high poly meshes, only the specular required me to paint it myself. The UV'ing of the low poly head was quite difficult but with the help of my friend and lecturer this went quite smoothly and ended up giving me a good result.

Overall I really enjoyed this part of the module. It went smoothly, the work I created looks good and it didn't even take that long. I learnt how to do several basic painting techniques in ZBrush which will be very useful in future. I also learnt about how to bake out of ZBrush onto a low poly version of the model. It also helped me a little with imagination (don't laugh, it's true!) as it got me thinking about using a wider spread of things for textures. On this alien head alone I used jellyfish, burnt flesh, rotten flesh, several types of bone, gecko eyes, lizard scales and raw meat pictures to create his final image. This was a great exercise.

Next I plan to get some nice Marmoset renders of the low poly head before moving onto completing the cottage assignment before my final hand in on the 28th of April.

The Low Poly Head In Maya

Ambient Occlusion Map

Cavity Map

Diffuse Map

 Normal Map

Specular Map

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.

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. 

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.