Alien Head Texture

Week 10&11

Our last task for week 10&11 was to texture an alien head sculpture, sculpted in Zbrush.

This time we didn't use Photoshop for textures, what we were supposed to do was  polypaint the mesh in Zbrush. When I first saw the alien head sculpture, my first thought was that it look like a shark, I fancied that it was from a planet that is covered by water and that it lives deep in the oceans. 

So having the that in mind I looked up some reference of sharks and started my vertex painting. After that I used ZApplink, which grabs a screenshot directly from Zbrush and opens it in Photoshop. Then there I can use that to add textures to my mesh and make it look more realistic. After I was done with that I saved the file returned to Zbrush and it automatically imported the changes I did to my texture in Photoshop.

I also used another method, I sourced textures from the internet, imported them into Zbrush and painted them onto my mesh directly. I sourced a crocodile armor and applied it on the top of his head like he has a hard shell for protection.

It looked nice, but I wanted to add more detail to it, so I sourced a frog skin texture and applied it beneath the crocodile armor.

I add a bone texture to the teeth just so I could add some detail and more definition to the teeth.

After I was done with adding textures to the mesh I used another function in Zbrush called project manager. I used project manager to add some highlights to it giving it a more realistic look. With this I was finished with my polypainting and all I got left to do was bake my diffuse, normal map and ambient occlusion from the hight poly mesh's I exported from Zbrush to the low poly mesh in Maya.

I was finished with the baking, added the texture to the low poly mesh and decided to render my final work in Maya. However, before I did that I decide to try something out. I made a copy of the eyes and scaled them to make them a little bit bigger, turned down the transparency, worked around with the specular for it and the final result was that I got lenses. I did that to add more specular power to the eye and make them look realistic. So after doing that I started rendering in Maya and I did that so I could try something new and also get a better understanding of rendering and lighting in Maya.

This is the final render I made for this task.

Building Texturing

Week 8&9

In this post I will show and explain how I work through my task, which was to texture a cottage.

On week 8 our task was to texture the door for the building task, because we were shown some new methods we could use for this task. In Maya we had a high poly and a low poly version of the door. I used the high poly mesh to bake a Normal map and an Ambient occlusion, so I could after that apply it to my low poly model. All my bakes I did in Maya, because Xnormal was giving me some problems with the results of the bakes. Also to ovoid overlapping I baked each item separately and we I was finished with that, I exported the UV's and started texturing. I then sourced a wood texture and covered the pillar and arch of the door. However, later on I'm going to apply some ornaments and patterns to the pillars, that's why I needed distortion free UV's for the pillars, because there will be seams on the corners.

I went back into Maya, duplicated my mesh and made a UV projection with camera planar in perspective view, only for the pillars. I assigned a wood texture to it and placed it so that the seams were covered. After that I selected my original mesh, opened Transfer maps, used the duplicate as my source mesh and baked an Diffuse map for it.

The result was pretty funky, but the parts I was interested in were the seam areas of the texture, I removed everything else and layer this above the base texture. After this  I got a seam free texture.

After that I sourced some celtic ornaments and scaled it to fit the arch and pillar. I set the Fill to 50% and turned on the layer fx inner shadow. After that I added a wood texture to the door and to give it a bit of a worn look I duplicated the layer and set it on Multiply to make it a little bit darker. I applied a texture for the door handle and for the hinges. After that I made a normal map for the wood texture, running surface blur, so I could get rid of some of the noise. I also did a normal for the ornaments and the hinges.

When I was finished with texturing and normal mapping, I made a specular map and that was it for the door, I assign a blin to the mesh, so I could use the specular and applied my texture. 

After the door was finished, on week 9 I started working on texturing the building.

The principles were the same, but the only difference was that we used different texture maps for each part of the cottage. The front wall, side wall and the pillar had duplicates, so I only needed to make a texture for one and it automatically was assign to the duplicates.

What I did for the door, I also did for the cottage. I baked normal map and AO from a high poly objects to the low poly objects. I also added so personal touch to it by adding the sign above the door. After that it was all about texturing.

I sourced a concrete, wood, stone, moss ect.

On the images you can see the textures I used for the cottage. For some of them I hand painted the AO. For some parts of the concrete texture I used an layer mask and for other I just played with the levels just to give it a more worn and old look. I did a normal map the for all the textures the same way I did for the door. I also made a specular for each one.

For the roof I had to make 6 separate tilling textures for the middle, top edge, corner edge, top corner edge, lower corner edge and the lower edge. For each and every one of them I made a normal map and specular map.

For the windows I used an illumination map based on the window diffuse texture.

And this was the final result: