It's been a while since my last post and I can only apologise for the delay. The deadline is approaching, silhouette looming over the horizon (which is now much clearer now everyone is staying inside due to Covid-19). I have been finishing off my other assignments in the meantime, and since environment art had the latest deadline I thought it would only make sense to work on the assignments with earlier deadlines first.
My update is a pretty nice one, though: I finished putting together an albedo for the building! This will be used as the basic colour for my shop, which will then have ambient occlusion and normal values added to to make every brick and pipe stand out and look 3D.
I started with getting some basic textures off of Textures.com, and then taking them into my drawing software (on my iPad because I didn't trust myself with Photoshop using a mouse and keyboard). I then did some quick tests of placing the textures over parts of the UV map I had previously exported, and I used them in Maya to preview what it would look like.
My first test map looked like this.
I decided against trying all of it, in case the map would need a lot of adjusting, so I went with the parts that would be the most tricky, like the window frames. The result was this:
For a rough attempt I was very pleased: I had gotten some of the accent colours nicely, and the trim over the whole building stopped it looking horribly boring. I did notice, however, that the windows looked odd, because the texture I had used for the glass was leaking over where the wooden frame needed to be. My goal, therefore, was to fix them, and then add the remaining areas of texture.
The resulting map was this:
Which when applied looked like this:
I am very happy with this so far: as a base set of values, the dark of the brick makes the whole building look gothic and a little brooding, while the gold, brown and cream accents really make the steampunk pipes and sign stand out. It also looks old and worn, which for a magical building that has likely stood for hundreds of years, fits nicely.
I am happy to leave the base albedo there, and next time I will be applying normal maps and adding to the texture in Substance Painter. See you then!
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