Texturing Crates

I wanted to go something a little bit more basic than the stuff I have been doing so far and so I went ahead and started making some textures for a crate. This is where a lot of courses wtart from when teaching about unwrapping (or at least unwrapping a hard-surface model as it is infinitely easier than character unwrapping).

The secondary purpose of this exercise was to work a little bit on making degradation on textures and also to actually normal map something (for once!). What I had been doing up till now was using grunge brushes which gave me a pretty satisfactory result in a fairly short amount of time. However, I found a much more effective and much quicker method of creating wear. Before I go into detail let's look at the maps.

Here is the unwrap...very straight forward..

Here we have the diffuse texture:

The top right was actually the bottom of the crate so as you can't see I didn't both too much with adding anything to it.

Then based on that I made the specular and normal maps:

Because the crates were quite dark anyway I just needed to lower the levels a bit to ensure that they were not reflective at all. The middle crate on the left had that one sticker with the gear which I wanted to reflect a little bit of light so I desaturated it and upped the exposure. All in all there wasn't much going on here in terms of reflectivity and also because the signs would be relatively worn that would make things that were normally reflective, less so.

This was actually done using xNormal filters in Photoshop. This makes the process of normal mapping much simpler. Although bear in mind that I would not be able to use the same filter if I actually wanted to make some detailed normal map. I would have to actually model the high poly version.

So, here is the final result:

I'm not too happy with the normal mapping of the screws if I'm honest but then again it is a small detial so not something that can't be overlooked. I am very happy with the 'worn' look of the stickers and paint on the crates on the other hand although I should have dulled down the colours of the yellow sticker. Finally I really don't like the ambient occlusion and how noticeable it is on the bottom of the left most crate. When I say noticeable I mean it just looks dirty. It doesn not look like a contact shadow so that is definitely something I would have to change.