Alright, let's kick this one off then!
For me, a treasure chest can come in many forms. I'm a sucker for flee markets, and I love poking around on the old attic, looking for "hidden treasures" :P
My idea behind this was simple; make one of the models look like an old travellers chest. I absolutely love these, as you never know where they have been, and most importantly, what treasures might lie hidden inside!
Click for maps.
This was actually a quite easy texture.
I started out with finding a suitable leather texture on cgtextures.com.
After finding two textures, one "clean" and one slightly more grungy, I tiled them in Photoshop and matched the colours and brightness on each texture to one another.
Adding wear and tear to the textures was done by reviling parts of the grungy texture on top of the clean one. I reviled more of the grungy texture around the edges, since this is where the chest would have taken the most beating over the years.
After doing this, I went ahead and started drawing in some more wear at the very edges of the model using the dodge tool and my trusty Wacom tablet. I also added some stains using a few grunge brushes, a pure black colour and the stain-layer which I was painting on set to overlay.
To add more depth to the texture, I rendered out an ambient occlusion map and baked it into the texture.
Seeing as how I was beginning to run out of time, having wasted quite a lot of it on detailing the leather, I rushed the metal parts and quickly created the normal map and specular using CrazyBump.
Fun theme, I must say!
