Hello. It’s time for an update on my sci-fi crate, so here we go!
The inspiration for my crate is all from the Halo and Portal games. Well for shape and model I was looking more at the Portal’s “companion cube” as I hope you can tell from the rough and hard edges I have in my crate. When it comes to texture mostly of what I aimed for is from Halo I would say, as the crate I am trying to create is a bit more serious than those from the Portal’s series.
So for the diffuse map (the map that holds all colours, icons and so on. think of it as a textured piece of paper that is wrapped around your model.) I chose the materials metal, rubber and carbon fibre as they are rough and almost industrial, just like the Spartan suit from halo is. For getting the right appearance of the materials I will have to use a specular map to get the reflection and normal map for the texture of it but that’s for next week. As the Spartan suit’s is themed with one high saturated colours of either green, red or blue I thought my crate would have one of these as colour theme. I chose red simply because I think it looks better than the others. (And maybe a little because I didn’t wanted to do blue just because “sci-fi” is supposed to be “blue”, wanted to try if I could make it work with red.)
The colours I used (well, it was only red) I made pretty hard saturated. The colour is distinct and even darkened a bit to compensate for the brighter metal scratches and polished parts inside the spheres. The rubber I made with zero saturation as to make contrast with the redness so they are basically all dark grey. To give them a little bit of wear and tear to fit the rest of the texture I highlighted the edges as when rubber or plastic gets damage they tend to brighten a bit. It also adds a bit to contrast so the grey parts aren’t all grey and boring.
The colour I use is warm. As sci-fi tend to have a bluish tone to it, it is often a cold felling in a sci-fi image overall and as I stated before I wanted to see if I could do the opposite of the “stereotypes” of sci-fi. My crate also have a dirty look to it, it looks like it have been out in the sun and hot weather for ages, maybe in a dessert. At least it doesn’t look like a new, directly from factory crate for sure.
This is my crate with an “UV-checker” I got from Nataska, our 3D teacher. It is used when doing the UV map. By using this it is much easier to see how large or small the resolutions on the different parts of the UV map are. This is all so that your crate won’t look blurry on some spots as they have too few pixels, while some will have “too many”. You would want a diffuse that is as even as possible. You can also use it to see so that there aren’t any big distortions on your texture and if there are you might need to re-cut your UV-map and relax the tensions creating those distortions and warps.
For my crate I chose to use the same area of the UV map several times so that my result would be of higher resolution in the texture as we were limited to 512px X 512px for this assignment. For my crate that is symmetrical in all dimensions this isn’t a big of a problem as the symmetry already is obvious and the details are so small they are hard to see if being repeated compared to an unsymmetrical crate of a different material (like if you see the same planks of a wooden box being repeated they are much easier to spot). Also, this crate has six sides, and no matter how you try to look at it you will only see a maximum of three sides at the same time, so why don’t repeat the texture on those sides that you can’t see at the same time? This saves both time in creating all of the maps, but the crate also gets a higher resolution by reusing the space on the UV-map.
This is how my final diffuse map turned out. As you can see I reused a lot of space. If I haven’t done this the resolution would have been around 6 times smaller than what I managed to do now. But as I said before, this only works for a few types of situations such as mine.
This is how my crate looks in the Unreal Engine (using UDK). Note that this is only with a diffuse map. The specular map and the normal map will be made next week, and hopefully this crate will look much nicer than it does right now.
That’s it for now!
Hare gött!
-Lui
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October 11th, 2014 at 12:23 am
Hi Ludwig! I’m basically hella drunk but I made a promise last we met at the bar and I intend to keep it:
you could’ve saved UV space by basically overlapping all your crate faces, as they are all the same and none of them unique you could’ve
achieved a maximum of 512×512 for every side by simply overlapping them, even if you wanted unique faces you could’ve achieved a higher operational resolution by deciding what your focal point was in your UV projection.
To summmarize; what I’m saying is that if you had no intention of making any single face unique you could’ve used all the space and translated it into UV space for a single – and simultaneously pan all of your faces.
The specular and also the normal you mention in the post is best made from a color-discarded (i.e. .greyscaled) diffuse texture, so having a optimal diffuse texture is key for making a good normal/specular texture, keep that in mind as you progress.
That’s all I can think of, nice work – from a super-hammered fellow student!
p.s if nothing I just posted makes sense ask me in class and I’ll show you
October 11th, 2014 at 11:08 pm
Hi! nice to see you taking the time commenting on my post even though you’re hella drunk, haha!
Well when saying that I could have saved space on my UV-map buy overlapping all of my faces (I guess by all faces you mean all polygons of my whole mesh? I’m still a bit unfamiliar with all new words and definitions for 3D work, lol x)) wouldn’t that have change the whole crate’s appearance as there wouldn’t be any different materials. for example if I do place all the polygons/faces so that each of them cover the whole UV-map I wouldn’t be able to have more than like the red scratch metal (for example. it could have been the shiny metal or any other of the ones I did on my diffuse) and the scratches would have looked all funky as they would have been going zigzag all over the place and not been stitching together well? or am I wrong? I do understand that the resolution would be improved though.
What I tried to do with my UV was just reusing all the same “pieces” of my mesh to save some of the UV space. I don’t know if I could have done it better but still having the crate look like it does now. if I can please show me in class, would be great!
Thanks a lot man! take care!
October 12th, 2014 at 12:12 am
Hi again!
I’ll try summarizing what I was trying to say when I was hella hammered;
The way your projections are set up right now you get a lot of seams and a lot more parts to deal with than what is necessary.
Considering that your crate is essentially a box with bevelled edges two projections would’ve covered two full sides had you selected them along an orientation (say z + -, x + -), and then the two remaining sides (top, bottom) could’ve been solved with either a single projection or two depending upon if you would’ve wanted unique features on any of these sides. That would’ve left less seams to contend with save for at the very edges of the crate sides which I don’t think would’ve impacted much – it’s also easier to work with seams like that as there’s a lot less seam “area” to keep in mind when making your diffuse.
Finally the advantage of a more cohesive projection in this particular case would’ve been that the UVs would’ve been an easier fit to the quadratic texture (power of two, yo) than its individual parts.
Also finally if you’re worried about how you would’ve gone about making the texture for your crate had the projection been cohesive versus as it is; in its elements – don’t be. There’s fabulous tools in Photoshop for working on individual elements in your texture. To name a few you could’ve either lassoed in your work area, or laid down a base flat color on a layer and either locked the transparent pixels or added (promptless at shift+ctrl+alt N) another layer and locked it (ctrl+alt G) to your base color layer.
So a tl;dr of what I in my drunken state was trying to argue for; as the object is relatively simple your life could’ve been made way easier had you made a projection per every side and overlapped those rather than projections for the individual elements of each side.
Also some quick final thoughts; the circular cut commands a lot of space on the UV yet it doesn’t really have that much going on, it’s always good practice to scale the UV islands in relation to how much information they’ll actually need to contain.
p.s. Also the faces inside of the circular cut could’ve done with some smoothing groups unless the faceted look was what you were going for; in which case don’t mind me!
October 12th, 2014 at 10:53 am
Okey, so basically I need to cut down on the seaming as it isn’t needed between the “areas” on the same side of the crate? But if I do seams I get individual pieces in the UV that I can rotate and move around to optimize and save space and get the higher resolution desired.
I think you’ll have to show me what the UV would have looked like if I did as you describe. If you don’t mind I can give you my crate and you can create the UV-pattern so I can see what you mean?
About the smoothing groups it is something I really want to learn as I now tend to add just more polygons instead of using the smoothing groups which is really not optimized for games. I will ask Nataska if she can show me how they work in 3Ds max or make a lecture about it.
Thanks again for you taking the time helping me out! cheers!
October 12th, 2014 at 1:37 pm
Sure thing, I’ll see you in class on Tuesday so I’ll help you in person then, that’ll probably be the most straight-forward approach.
October 30th, 2014 at 1:52 am
[…] this is how my Diffuse turned out (you can check my latest post about how I did […]