Week Four

After spending a large chunk of last week unwrapping the UV's for my models, I have moved on to the next, more interesting stage - texturing. Now it goes without saying that because we are doing an indoor environment this time round rather than, say, a character, the textures used will be exactly that - textures. No interesting, cleverly unwrapped facial features or clothing, just tiled wallpaper, household surfaces and the occasional rug - and that's ok, it is important that we familiarise ourselves with texturing more than just one aspect of a game. That said, the nature of this assignment would mean that a bit more time would be spent sampling and tweaking real-life imagery rather than creating such assets from scratch, which is another way in which the project differs from previous ones, such as the stylised rock or village.

Over the week I produced a total of 10 textures, some tileable, some more specific. Difficulty finding appropriate "starting point" images for each texture varied significantly during the process, for example, wallpaper 1 is was very easy to find on Google, but wallpapers 2 and 3 were not. This was likely due to the fact that wallpaper 1's design had caught more of the viewers eyes whilst watching the show (I in fact noticed that it is quite commonly used as a background for Sherlock fan sites) and has therefor gained popularity, becoming known as the general "Sherlock wallpaper". The other two, however, obviously haven't made as much of an impact with the viewers and are simply brushed over and accepted during viewings. I was surprised to find this at first - especially with wallpaper 2, which I found more appealing than wallpaper 1, though I could understand why the third was not recieving attention on the internet, due to its plain and simplistic nature. If you asked an average Sherlock viewer about the character's apartment, they'd most likely be able to give you the colour scheme of these walls, but not the exact pattern, being long vertical waves with a slight sheen.

In the end, I had to make texture for both of these designs from scratch, using photo reference. For wallpaper 2, I extracted an example of the tiling pattern from a high-res promotional photo, played around with the perspective to make it appear as if directly facing the camera, and touched it up into a much larger and crisper seamless texture. I used a similar technique for the Turkish rug - a decorative item of which I'm sure there are NO full pictures of on the web! To keep some level of clarity in the image after stretching and warping the original photo, I carefully removed extra artifacts by lasso-ing certain areas and replacing them with block colours or higher resolution textures - the median and sharpen filters also proved useful during these processes. I experienced a similar situation with the paintings, too - while the skull image is widely abundant on Google, other, more obscure features of the decor proved much harder to find, such as the small framed fly picture and sketch of Sherlock himself, which weren't even named pieces of art, just props specifically for the show!

The above image shows some of the textures after being applied to the UV's I mapped out last week. You may not be able to see here from the miniscule size of the 3DS Max preview, but the fact that I had to downscale and tile the floor and wall textures to squeeze them onto a single 2048 by 2048 targa has left them quite a bit more blurred and muddied than the original textures I produced. As soon as I can, I'm going to check whether it is alright to use sub materials, as this could easily solve the problem and let the models use the textures in all their full-scale glory. Seeing as the breif wants this scene to be as close to photo-realistic as possible, I believe this is quite important, but for now, though, I shall continue to add my textures to this little jigsaw so that I can at least see how the room looks with all the base colour maps applied - that way I can make any colour or size adjustments that may be required.

Here you can see that I have begun to play around with my textures in Bitmap2Texture, adjusting the normal and roughness maps in an attempt to acheive a wood-like character in the way that light falls on the cube. This is probably the most diverse texture that I have in terms of PBR, which is a shame as I would have liked to try out a wide range of different physical textures like I did last week (my metal and cobblestone ones looked great). Unfortunately though, a good few of the colour maps I've been assigned have no texture whatsoever (the wallpaper being a good example) and will only require a roughness map for gaging the sheen. I will continue working on this into week five.