Textures and Closeups

          Seeing as I did all the texturing for the environments I realised that I didn't actually have a post which looked closely at the texturing. I guess one of the reasons for this is that the button machine, cables machine and the workbench were the only things in the environment that will be seen from close so the aim was obviously to try and keep the resolution of the textures appropriate. So for this post I will mianly be looking at the textures used in those three machines while briefly going over some of the textures for the other machines/assets.


Below is a screenshot of the lower part of the button machine. I am very happy with how the body of the machine turned out, however there are several things I am not so pleased with. Most of the piping on this machine was textured using a single custom texture. For the corner pieces I just enabled the colour map and brightened up the material slightly. I think the colours work well with each other, however the corner pieces are too reflective. I should have definitely used a specularity map to make sure that only the brighter bits in the material reflect.

Next we have the actual button. I tried a few things with this button before deciding to leave it like this. The best result I could get out of it was if I made the texture about 60% reflective and about 50% glossy.

I am very pleased with how the bump worked out. I would normally apply an RGB Tint to the bump slot and copy the diffuse over, however that would mean if I wanted a REALLY subtle bump I would have to lower the settings way down. So instead I just copied the duffuse into the bump.

I then tried various intensities of self illumination. I was fairly certain from the start that this would not look so good because anything that is textured in this manner tends to lose all its details once illuminated.

So now lets look at a few renders of the workbench and the cables machine:

So as we can see the level of detail decreases as we go down the list. If we take a look at the workbench we can see that the blueprintsand most of the surfacing is a high-res texture. However if we look at the toolbox below the quality drops massively because this is something which will be seen only in wider shots so as long as there is suggestion of detail, the detail does not need to actually be there.

          With the last image I slightly overestimated the resolution of the texture that was required so you can see the difference between the sphere thing and the box thing it is on. So although this might look horrible, it will actually never be seen so it is enough to just have the very low-res texture in there.

          Finally, below is the unwrap for the rusty drawer underneath the workbench. Once again you can see that because this will not be seen the resolution of the texture I use drops massively. However I just wanted to experiment a little bit and make slightly better looking rust. I am very happy with the result considering I only used four colours - the 2 seen in the top right corner of the unwrap picture and two others as a faint background. It feels nice knowing I can paint something like what I want without having to immediately resort to finding textures online.