Week Seven: Texturing Hell

     Continuing immediately from last’s week blog post, over the weekend I modelled the final turret model. I used the previous model as a foundation, to cut down the amount of time I’d spend on modelling as I left too little time for texturing. I’ve mentioned a couple of time before on this blog, that I feel that I’m awful at texturing, and so I need to make sure I spend enough time on this section. I'm also in the camp that texturing is incredibly important for an asset, more so than modelling. Voxel games and pixel games have shown me how important it truly is.

Minecraft is probably the most well-known voxel game.

If I made all the blocks colourless, it’ll be incredibly difficult to make out the forms of the objects. This is probably the most extreme example I can think off to explain my thought process.

The modelling part of the asset production is something I feel quite confident in, especially low poly modelling. With a model cap of 5000 tris to make the turret, I could use the tris to smooth out any cylinders or rounded edges as well as producing elaborate antlers which feature heavily in the design.  

Modelling the basic form of the turret was done quite quickly, with the only significate amount of time spent on modelling the antlers, which also turned out to be the most time consuming section of the unwrap as well. The unwrapping was quite tricky for this model, as there was some geometry which was awkwardly placed inside the main cannon. Other than that, it was quickly done.

But now we get to the bane of asset production for me. Texturing. I started off adding the basic colours to create the albedo layer, each colour having its own layer. This makes the work flow easy for me, as well as none destructive via the usage of clipping layers and masks.

              My finished roughness, normal and albedo. Looking at back at these maps, I can see some of the crucial mistakes I have made on these maps. The Albedo map isn't too bad but looks odd with the paintly texture and the photobashing of the rust onto the cannon. The roughness map is all just block colours and instead it needs to be broken up, such as adding more values to the block colours. The normal map has sharpness to it, which creates a sharp transition from the flatness to the indent which for some parts, does not work.