Sci- Fi Crate

Week Three

This week we had the task to concentrate on texturing than modelling. We were presented with a high poly and an low poly models done in Maya and the task at hand was to unwrap the UV's on the low poly object, also make a normal map, specular map and an Ambient occlusion from the High Poly mesh and apply them over the Low Poly mesh. It is shown on the two images below. On the first image you can see a snapshot of the UV's that I imported in Photoshop to help me with my diffuse map. The second image is taken from Maya in which you can see the High Poly mesh on the left and the Low Poly mesh on the right. 

 After the UV unwrapping it came time for the baking. The baking could be done in Maya, but also it could also be done in Xnormal. The reason we used Xnormal was, because the baking it self take's less time, whereas in Maya it takes a lot of time. I did my baking in Maya, because I was having problems with Xnormal and I got some pretty good results from Maya after a little bit of waiting. First, I baked my Normal map. I did it by make my objects the same size and putting the low poly mesh on top of the high poly mesh, so the program could get the information from the High Poly and apply it correctly on the Low Poly. After going through the settings and choosing the size of my Normal map, which in most cases in 1024x1024 and saving in as an Targa file, I pressed the baking button. However, before I did it I made sure that both my objects are visible and selected, so the program could find them, other wise some nasty results would have come out. You can see the final result on the image below.

After that I baked my Ambient Occlusion the same way I did with the Normal map. Ambient Occlusion is used to give you this shadow effect over the object and where two objects are going through each other. You can see it on the image below. 

After all the baking it came time to start working on my diffuse. I wanted to give the crate a nicely worn look, as if it's been knocked around in the cargo bay and while moving it around. I found a pretty nice based metal texture with scratch's.

Next I applied it over my AO, for which I made a separate layer and set it on multiply so it showed through the texture below. I was also looking at areas on the crate which would be likely to get scuffed and chipped and I then copied them with the Clone Tool to the right places using my Snapshot for a guide.

After that I wanted to add some symbols, text and other colours just so I could brake it into different parts and give it's own style. For the text I used a mask, which give me the opportunity to add a texture over the text just to give it that worn look. For the symbols and the strips I used the Polygonal lasso tool to get some good designs and played with the levels to give them worn- old paint. However, for the cross I used and image from the internet and applied the same principle.

For now it looked good, but I didn't look to realistic, so I decided to add another texture over it to make it look even more lorn out. But from this texture I only used the chipped areas but I needed them to be white so under Select Colour ranged a sample of the light grey and used the layer levels to make them even more whiter. You can see it on the image below, how I have applied it to the texture. 

Next I copied the texture and from it made and Specular Map. I started desaturating the colour of the text and the strips almost everything. While I was doing that I was thinking about the effect I wanted to give my crate and about the material beneath the paint.

Finally, I used the scratches of my texture and put them on one layer, I then opened the X-normal Height to Normals filter from the Filter menu. After lowering the Smooth Value I got the result I needed and had made a Bump Map. I put the Bump Map over my Normal Map while putting the layer on Overlay, so it showed through, but the bumps could still be seen. The image below show's the final result for the Bump Map.

 And here you can see the final result of my Sci- fi Crate I did for this week.

Nikolay Kolev- 2013 

P.S: Please comment on what you thing.