STC #21 - August 3 - August 10 - Mailbox

[Minotaur0]

Nice theme!

[Craig Lewis]

Hopefully if I can find the time I'll give this a go

[sugarskull]

Nice theme, I have a couple ideas I might try out.

I took a quick look at the models - the personal mailbox has a gap in the model where the door meets the body of the box. If you're inside the box you can see out though this gap. I guess it's fine for the competition, but if I was going to put this into a game I'd want to fix that.

[Tiros]

Sugarskull: Yes, I'm aware of that, thought abut modeling an inside first, but it really isn't nessecary.. the gap won't really be noticable once it's all textured

Cheers!

[funkdelic]

Nice textures TIros, such an inspiration!

[sugarskull]

Here's my entry. I saw a picture online of a mailbox painted with flames and it inspired me to create a hotrod texture for the mailbox model. I wanted to give it a somewhat worn look as if it had been painted a while ago and weather has taken its toll.





Luckily I already had a decent tiling wood texture in my library (which I originally created using Wood Workshop utility), so the wood parts came together really quickly.

Painting the actual mailbox took the most of my time. The flames are basically just a gradient, masked out to create the shape, and some light scratches added on top. The rivets and reinforcement straps are photo referenced. The text on the mailbox door is just basic Arial Rounded, which is pretty close to the font used on actual U.S. mailboxes. I added emboss effect and lots of dirt around the letters.

I also did some baked occlusion using Maya Mental Ray.

I didn't have time to create specular or normal maps, unfortunately. I might make them later just for fun, since I think it would really add to the look of this texture.

[Tiros]

Craig: Would be nice seeing one of your textures mate, so get crakin'!


Funkdelic: Thanks for those kind words mate.. It's not often I get to hear comments like that really, heh


Sugarskull: That's a good job you've done there, but I got some crits though

Personally, I would've added a bit more contrast to the paint of the wooden pole. And also added a weak "outer glow" 1px, black, on normal blending to give it a bit of depth.

Also, it's usually quite important to sharpen up your textures when they're this small, as righy now it looks a tad blurry.

Other than that, I don't think there's much you could've improved upon while only using a diffuse. A specular and normal would as you said really add t this piece.. Imo, normals are the most important, and so I always go for them first. Specular could be easily done within a minute or two

There's one last thing I noticed now however, and thats the metal cap sitting ontop of the pole, you might want to define the material a bit better. One can tell it's metal, but it's not that easy and might aswell be black painted wood or plastic. So, if it's metal, add some small scratches to the edges and a bit of "metallic wear".

Cheers!

[buddy the designer]

Hmm nice ST idea. Might take part in this one.

EDIT: Are we allowed to seal this missing strip of polygons on front of 2nd model?

[sugarskull]

Thank you Tiros, excellent crits. I agree with everything you said. I especially notice my lack of attention to the pole cap, I pretty much slapped that together at the last minute.

How do you typically sharpen your textures? Do you sharpen particular layers or the full texture? Do you use Photoshop sharpen or a plug-in that does it better?

Am I allowed to post revisions? Of course, revisions can't be considered for the competition, since I already used up my time.

Edit: Buddy - I hope we're allowed to do something about it. The gap was showing up in my renders so I slightly scaled the door to hide it.

-Audrey

[Tiros]

Buddy & Sugarskull: Actually, you're not allowed to edit these models. And I still don't see why you guys go on about it as it won't even be visible once you textured it.. if you turn on doublesided textures it'll just show as black, which such a gap normally would

Anyways, I guess you're allowed to scale the door up a little to cover it. Please not however that normally one ain't allowed to change the models at all.

And as a tip, if you render so close to the box that the gap is clearly visable, then you're either rendering out a very large image, or you zoomed in so far that pretty much nothing of the model is visible.. plus.. it'd just make it look lowres


Sugarskull: While sharpening my textures I just use the standard sharpen filter. And I don't go in sharpening different layers different amounts at the end, I simply make sure they have an even sharpness and look good through the whole texturing process, then sharpen it up a bit extra towards the end. Don't go overboard though, it'll completely ruin the whole texture if used too much.

Cheers!