Hey! I've had quite a few questions about my workflow after i
posted a texture set here a while back, I've promised a few people to
do a short workflow tutorial about it and here it is. This is quite
a brief tutorial and doesnt go really indepth into the texturing and
modeling techniques used but was created to show how i go about making
a normal mapped texture similar to the things in my texture pack. The
modeling took around 30-40 minutes with the texture baking and the
texturing itself took exactly 40 minutes so there are a few flaws here
and there in both the texturing and the modeling.
I hope you like it, and if you have any questions feel free to ask. (Click thumbs for fullsize) Modeling - Step 1 to 4 I start out with a plane matching the dimensions of the texture i wanted to make, in this case 512x512.
Then i split this plane into the parts i want to have on my texture and
detach it to make it easier to work with. This way you dont have to
worry as much about edge flow. Then i block out the shapes, adding edges and detail where needed. Lastly i add a mesh smooth modifier on it.
Modeling - Step 1 to 8 Then i set up my projection, this is quite simple for this, just create a plane and place the high poly over it.
There are a few smoothing problems in the highpoly but instead of
tweaking them to death in max i just do a quick paintover fix in
photoshop, as shown in image two. Picture three shows the normal on
a flat plane. Then render out an ambient occlusion map. I used quite
low settings in this case to save time, 64 samples with a spread of 1,2.
The resulting normal with a three point light set up, few problems here and there but for time reasons this will have to do
Texturing
Now the fun starts.
Texturing - Step 1 to 4
First step: I begin with adding the ambient occlusion on top of my
premade metalish texture and splitting the shapes into different layers
and adding color on that. Second step: With a scattered brush i add
a mask to the color layers and remove paint on the edges where i find
it suited. I also tweak the colours in certain areas Third step: I
add a slight bit of highlight to certain edges to make it look a bit
more interesting in areas where the light doesnt do the normal and
specularity of the texture so that it looks good. Fourth step: I add a bit of colour here and there to make it a bit more interesting.
Texturing - Step 5 to 6
Now i just tweak the texture to make it look a bit better by adjusting
contrast, color and saturation aswell as sharpening it a bit. Last
step is making the specularity, i could have spent a bit more time on
this but what i did is basicly to grayscale it, remove the ao and trim
colors and using the masks to up the contrast in areas where the paint
is missing/scratched away.
And our finished texture rendered in max on a flat plane. Far from
perfect but hopefully this answers some questions. Wish i had more time
to go a bit more in depth though, but thats for another time .
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