STC #34 - February 8 - February 15 - Altar

[Tiros]

Note: The image might be a bit misleading, it's not an aztec altar, and there's also terrain
included in the model. Unfortunately I weren't able to find any good image to represent
it at all. Good luck people, and remember, ZBrush is allowed!

.

[Kaskad]

Doesn't seem to be unwrapped, and it's rather awkwardly all on one smoothing group as if we were going to be baking or something. If we're supposed to unwrap it ourselves... ok.

e/ for the max one, at least.

[Pankake]

Tested max and modo objs and there are uvs . You should be able to edit the smoothing off the clock.

[Kaskad]

Yeah, betting I didn't import the texture coordinates with it. Unwrapped it myself anyway \o/

[Tiros]

Hmm, smoothing-groups and an unwrap should be on there already. I'll have to doublecheck it.

All of em worked perfectly for me, both the smoothing-groups and the uv's are there.

[Kaskad]

Everything's just painted with the paint brush + smudge tool. Nothing fancy. Spent the first hour on the rocks and the next on everything else.

[Tiros]

Nice job Kaskad

Somwhow it feels that the rest lacks a bit of depth as the stairs have some very dark lines indicating the depth of the stones crevices. The colour of the rocks vs the sans kinda clashes too imo, but, it's good nevertheless.

Most likely gonna give this one a go myself later.

Cheers!

[kaze369]

I did a render to texture for the diffuse color and AO. then I overlayed the stone texture on the stairs. then I did an overlay with a rock texture for the surrounding area. I wish I'd chosen a different rock texture. I used a paper texture for the book and a gold metal texture for the candle holders. I made the specular my using desaturation and changing the brightness and contrast. I tried making the height map by making light and dark areas from the diffuse map. it didn't quite turn out well and I probably didn't need it in the first place. I then ran the height map through crazybump to see if I could get a decent result. I guess not. well this is the result I have.
I would really like some feedback if possible.
Enjoy!



MAPS

[Kaskad]

I like the direction kaze but I think you need to be more careful when phototexturing, if you look at the stairs especially you'll see that the seams in the concrete (?) block texture you used don't seem to have any correlation with the geometry of the stairs themselves, and the texture you've used on the rocks is very noisy and doesn't read well. The railings, table, book and vases, work pretty well though.

Originally Posted by Tiros

Somwhow it feels that the rest lacks a bit of depth as the stairs have some very dark lines indicating the depth of the stones crevices. The colour of the rocks vs the sans kinda clashes too imo, but, it's good nevertheless.

Yeah I agree, I think the rocks definitely feel like a separate entity from everything else since they just lack the contrast. I'd change it but I have literally no time left on it

[latinmessiah]

Maps

Tiros: Thanks for including various file types, ie: Maya!

How I did it...

Since the uv's looked solid and non-overlapping, I skipped the usual routine of re-wrapping and went straight to baking maps.

First I duplicated the model, beveled the edges, and used "transfer maps" to get the normal and ao maps. Then, I used three textures (rock, stone, and brick) which I found at CGTextures. Not having to worry about tiling them saved a lot of time in Photoshop, so I just slapped them in there and scaled as needed, followed by the usual levels and color adjustments.

Once the diffuse texture was ready, I began isolating the different layers according to the material type (rock, stone, and brick) then saved as a separate normal map (rock_rough, rock_detail). I did this for stone and brick as well. The reason I did this is to independently control the level of detail via layer opacity. I used to use Crazybump's nifty sliders for this, back when it was free.

For the spec map, I just used the diffuse texture along with a desaturated/level adjusted version of the normal map. A friend at work showed me this and it's a great way to add back in the highlights and shadows that is incorporated into the normal map.

To light the scene, I used two orange spotlights for the candles and three point lights for the right, middle, and left sides of the altar.

Obstacles encountered...

The one thing that was a pain to fix was the low res appearance of the rock. I tried adding even more detail in the diffuse, but it turns out it was the scale of the UV shell that was causing the problem. To compensate, I just kept it in the shadows.