As promised, in this post I will run through my texturing process for the Sci-Fi crate model. Photoshop CS6 and Maya2016 are the software packages that I will be using for this project. Having a good mesh for your asset and well thought out UV's are essential to a professional texture finish, so make sure those models and UV sheets are sound before you begin.
Once you are happy with the layout of your UV's you can then take a UV snapshot. This will allow you to load the UV guides into your digital painting software of choice. Remember that some of your more complex 3D models may require more than one texture sheet, so make sure that you have the correct objects selected for this UV snapshot.
The options for this tool allow you to give the image a name, change the save location, alter the size of the image in pixels, choose the colour of the UV guides and designate the image format.
Open Adobe Photoshop and load the outUV file that you saved from Maya. This will give you a document that is the exact size in pixels for the texture that you intended. At this point I like to create a new fill layer with the general colour of the texture that am creating. If you have a more complex texture sheet, you can use the marque selection tool to select and fill areas with the desired colour. This gives you a nicely organised space to work in and helps to keep you focused on the separate areas of the texture itself.
Needing a metal texture without photographic textures presented me with a problem to solve. Painting this using the brush tool would have taken up far too much time. I decided to create a new layer and fill it with a colour, adding noise to this through the filter options with the monochromatic option checked. This was my first step in the creation of a subtle metal texture.
Adding a motion blur filter to the noise gave me this grainy metal effect. I then reduced the opacity of the layer itself to 38%, allowing the colour of the fill layer below it to show through. I could have used a Luminosity layer to gain a similar effect but i preferred the colour that this opacity setting presented me with. Opacity can be used in multiple tools including the brush tool, this can be used as a natural shading technique.
Using the UV shells as a guide I then began to illustrate some panels. I did this on a new layer using the pen tool. This is a vector based tool, which means that it uses mathematical algorithms to calculate curves and lines. Once your path has been created you can then define the point size of the stroke that will follow the path and the colour of the stroke.
Detail was then added to the texture using different layers for each part of the texture. In order to create the warning tape I selected an oblong shape with the marque tool and filled it with a colour, this oblong was then positioned with the free transform tool and duplicated to create the stripe effect. Once one corner was finished I then merged these layers and duplicated them, pushing each into position with the free transform and rotate tool. In order to add more interest to the warning tape, I used the eraser tool with a custom paint splat brush to scuff up the edges of the warning tape. Subtle shading was added to the texture using the brush tool with the colour set to black. The layer style was changed to luminosity and the opacity of the layer was altered. Finally I added some small pieces of detail such as the buttons and number system. These were created using the type tool and the marque selection tool with the fill tool.
The final product is successful in my opinion however it could have been improved with some more defined shading to the texture. This would have improved the performance of the normal map, which was created using the XNormals plugin for Photoshop. I am always looking to improve on my own work and am very critical of myself. This helps me to push myself forward and learn new skills at an accelerated rate. Thanks for reading and have a good afternoon....
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