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Creating a Next-Gen farm

“Creating a Next-Gen Farm ” by Daniel Vijoi
The first part is the layout for the main texture for the house, which will be a 1024×1024 in size. This will contain the long brick wall, the wooden wall as well as the building details like doors, windows, stairs, etc. The roof tile will use a separate 512×1024 texture. On the bottom left of the image is the layout for the 512×512 water tower texture. The 256×256 alpha texture on the right will be used for the girders and the ladder. This texture will help us save a lot of polygons that would have been used for this type of details. Apart from the textures, there’s also one 1024×512 for the pickup truck.As you can see, the sketch doesn’t have to be too precise, it just needs to help the artist better position the elements on the canvas, so there is little to no space unused. In case there is some extra room on the texture, some elements that need fine detail can have their UV’s scaled up to have better resolution. This should be done with care as differences in texture resolution can be quite obvious is exaggerated. There’s also a fine grid I’ve drawn there for each 128 pixels, to make things easier.Here is the finished main diffuse (color) texture.

Diffuse map
Because this is a photorealistic building, the textures have to be carefully chosen. They have to have good detail; they shouldn’t be blurry or contain artifacts. The most important thing to look for is interesting details for the material needed, as the color can be easily changed in Photoshop.Some details look better if they are exaggerated a bit, even in photorealistic textures, to add extra character to the object/building. The building has to integrate well into the game through chromatic, style, age, etc. The source photos have to be modified as little as possible as not to end up with a boring over filtered monochromatic image. So the texture has to be realistic and believable to compensate the lack of geometry.
Separate details have to be distinct and well placed on the texture to avoid obvious tiles and to make it easier to read. One thing to be avoided as much as possible in Photoshop are layer blending modes. Normal should be used as much as possible, although Overlay, Color Burn or any other blending mode can be used if it doesn’t affect the final look.
Layers are another element that should not be overused. Using to many of them makes the work hard to manage, especially if they are not named and grouped properly. The best thing to do is to keep as few layers as possible keeping only the layers that control specific characteristic of the texture, like color, volumetric details. Some of these layers will also help to generate the rest of the textures, like normal and specular maps more easily.
As an example, these are the layers that make up the wall texture:

Height map
To create a more efficient normal map, we first need to create what is called a height map. The creation process is similar to creating a bump map which is then transformed into a normal map by using the nVidia Photshop Plugins. The normal map process needs to start with a careful examination of the diffuse texture because it might be tempting to just desaturated the image and run the nVidia filter on it, but that will have the desired effect. The height map has to be done in layer starting with the large volumes by using gray values to define the details. The next step will be transforming smaller details into height map. This step by step approach will ensure the best quality for the resulting texture.

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