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.

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 - 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 - 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.