#texturing progress

[cameron-burnside-thesis]

There was no update for the week of 12/3 due to final Thesis presentations, but I have been making consistent progress here over the past two weeks with the textures.

As of now, everything is completed. I have modeled, UVed, and textured everything that I set out to do this semester in preparation for next semester. I finished up the textures for the props and I’m still tweaking many of the maps, especially the height and normal maps for a lot of the wood, and the roughness maps in many places; but overall I am pleased with the results that I was able to achieve this semester.

There were a few shaky moments these last few weeks where my progress was slower than I wanted at times, but this has been a learning experience and I’m glad my schedule worked as well as it did.

Now that everything is completed I can start to move on to the next phase of this project. Building out the areas of interest to tell the characters story. Over winter break I’ll be looking into bringing this project into Unreal with the possibility of there being interactivity, so that the viewer can move around the space and more freely explore and learn about the character.

[cameron-burnside-thesis]

There was no update for the week of 11/18, things got hectic with other due dates so I chewed through by buffer week, but that’s why I built that into my schedule in the first place.

That being said, last week I continued the texturing phase, this time with the larger props. Once again it was important to me that these pieces have a consistent feel, while not blending together with the each other and the environment due to all the wood that has gone into the cabin already.

I’m still trying to find ways to add different colors to the wood grain while still keeping it simple enough that it could be accomplished in a fantasy/ medieval setting. And as with the previous post I am still tweaking the other maps that are going into these textures, especially the normal and height maps. Pieces like the stove also need a little bit more work because the material is so different to a lot of the other pieces in the scene.

This week may be a little rushed as well, with the holiday I may not have time to work on getting all the textures I planned for this week, but I am still confident that I will have everything done by the end of the semester. If I am unable to get to a computer that has Substance Painter over break then I may start to move my models over to Unreal. 

After talking with several people at different points during this project I am leaning towards making my deliverable an Unreal project or playable .exe, with some degree of interactivity. That way people can move around the cabin and find the story by looking at the objects. And if I’m able to work out a way to show information on screen when objects are interacted with, then I can literally tell the characters story as a way to offer background to what people are seeing. That being said I don’t have any experience with building interactivity in Unreal, so that might be a bit over scoped and I wouldn’t even know. Over break I plan to look into this so that by the time I get back next semester I will have a better idea of what my final deliverable will entail.

[cameron-burnside-thesis]

Last week was the first week of texturing! Which means that my focus has shifted from asset design and creation to finalizing assets and getting them ready for placing in the scene and eventually rendering. But before that can happen they must be UV’d and textured. Last week as you can see was focused on just the cabin itself.

So it being a log cabin there is a lot of wood. A big part of this was keeping the idea that this cabin was built with the trees that were cleared on the property and that the setting the cabin exists in is a fantasy, somewhat medieval time period so I wanted everything to still be very natural and a little dirty. At the same time I didn’t want every surface to have the same color and grain pattern on the wood so I was able to bring little bits of color here and there to kind of break up the monotony of it all.

I’m pretty pleased with it over all, but there are still some things that need a little more work, and little fixing. As you can see all the pieces are missing the end grain texture which is different to the grain you’d see on the rest of a wood board so I’ll have to go back and add that where ever it’s needed. I’m also still tweaking the settings on the other maps that are applied to these objects like normal, height, roughness and so on so this look isn’t final in that aspect, but I think the colors are for the most part what they will be in the end.

These next couple of weeks are going to be a little rougher as I start texturing the many pieces of furniture and props so we’ll see how that goes, but I have high hopes based on the results I was able to achieve already with just the cabin itself.