For my first attempt at the cottage I decided to rearrange the models UV's. This was to minimize the amount of texture sheets used for the model, thus reducing the memory required to load the asset in a game engine.
The fist stage of the texturing process was to add block colour, I did this on its own layer using the marque and the fill tool. This technique gives you a base layer in order to build up the texture using custom brushes in Adobe Photoshop. You will be surprised how quickly this moves along the whole texturing process.
For the roof tiles I needed to quickly build up the texture in its own layer. Using rulers to mark our a square I painted one tile, duplicating this and moving it to the next position. The idea was to create a quick tileable texture within this document, this could then be duplicated and moved into position.
By duplicating the original tile layer many times I was able to create a tileable roof texture. There were gaps in the texture and areas that needed a little more attention. This was resolved by using custom brushes on two separate layers. First I painted a darker colour on the layer behind the tiles, creating the illusion of depth. Working on a layer over the top of the tiles I then touched up the areas where there were gaps, using similar colours to that of the tiles.
Once happy with the texture I then duplicated the layer a couple of times, creating a long texture that could be free transformed and warped into the shape of the UV for the roof. A similar method was used for the small roof section of the cottage. Extra shading detail was then added using a custom Photoshop brush, this included shading and highlight information as well as textures for the underside and roof apex. I used this same method and a different colour pallet in order to create the brick texture for the cottage walls.
I wanted the window to seem as if there was light being emitted from inside the building. This was achieved using a soft round brush with a specific colour setting. Once the colour was introduced I then selected the window from the colour layer, inverting the selection and deleting the 'glow' pixels from the new layer. This was to ensure that the 'glow' only resided inside the window section. The window frame was created using the line tool, I used a black fill colour and pushed all of the line shapes into the correct position. These layers were then rasterized and merged, having their blending options altered to get the gray colour overlay and edge shading.
Moving on to the wood details and the door of the cottage I created a colour fill layer. The wood texture was hand painted in a separate document. For the texture I filled a layer with the base colour, working over the top of this using a soft round brush for the wood grain. Detail was then added to this using a custom brush that I had created earlier in my work life. I used a layer mask in order to remove the wood texture from undesired UV locations once the texture was imported to the texture sheet document.
When the wood texture was introduced I decided that the hue and saturation should be edited, this was done using a hue and saturation layer with a clipping mask applied, meaning that it only effected the layer below it. For the paneling on the door I duplicated a section of the wood texture. Using the line tool to give the impression of the panels, the line layers were rasterized and merged, with the layer style set to multiple. Blending options were then set on this layer to give an outer glow with a colour of black, mimicking the ambient occlusion that would be present in between each wooden panel.
For the final touches of the texture sheet I added extra shading using custom brushes. I also added the window frames and the 'glow' texture that was present on the previous window textures.
I found that duplicating the layers used to create the diffuse and putting them in a new folder names spec is a great way to speed up your workflow when creating different maps. The layers can then be de-saturated and have their levels altered to suit their particular specular highlight information.
For this project I also created a luminosity map. This makes the windows appear as if they are emitting light, even when the lights in the scene have their values lowered. I believe that this would create a nice effect for a night time scene in a game engine.
Overall I believe that this was a successful experiment, as a learnt a lot of new techniques and gave a lot of thought into the overall textures of the cottage and how they should work together. I decided to start the cottage textures from scratch using a more modular method in the end. The thought came to mind that you may want to build similar structures in the game engine using sections of geometry from this one building, thus speeding up the workflow. This would mean that separate texture sheets of a smaller resolution could be used for each section of the building.
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