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 - 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.