Cabinet

Listening to Nils Frahm. Glass colours and textures.

Stairs de Macklin

Macklin Street cellar inspired stairs.

More Texture Work on the Bunk

Listening to AFX… Texturing the bunk. This is like the digital equivalent to knitting.

Macklin Cellar Texture Adventures

Macklin Street…  Me and Jim descended into the murky depths of the cellar at the weekend and pretty much documented every square inch of the place. It’s awesome down there… It used to be crammed full of old stuff, and weird stuff, like a boat engine and propellors etc. It was good to see it completely empty and actually be able to get around it without getting trapped.

I forgot to charge my camera batteries so Jim let me use his Canon DSLR and took a few shots himself.

Anyway, here’s a few:

There’s three rooms which are pretty nasty and then there’s this… A pristine white meat fridge with hanging hooks and a 30cm thick wooden door and Jim inside… straight out of an eighties slash horror movie.

Me in the cellar, taken by Jim Cork on his Hipstamatic iPhone.

Construction Begins

Whilst waiting for Biff to get creative on the lobe based artwork I’ve begun work on the modeling and texturing phase of the production.

My basic pipeline for this is 3ds Max for low poly versions, then Mudbox for any higher detail modeling and a mix of Mudbox and Photoshop for texturing. I always end up getting carried away with the texturing, usually wasting a good few hours working into parts of objects that aren’t visible to the camera. I do love texturing though… The hero objects are the more satisfying but there’s always good opportunity to add interesting details to the peripheral objects that help to build up the overall feel for an environment.

I got Total Textures V01 R2 from 3d Total for Christmas off my folks, which is extremely useful a starting point or for a blanket texture pass on all the elements in minutes. For the more important stuff I prefer to locate specific textures and surfaces. It’s time for a texture adventure. Yeah.

Textures…

A little Friday night texture work for the animation gods:

That should keep them fed til Monday.

Texture Elements

More texturing… Metal rods. A quick break down of some of the more common maps used for achieving surface effects.

Section of UV Template

Diffuse map

Bump map

Gloss Map

The above maps are used to create the surface material for the two rods on the image below.

Mapping the Textures of Time

I’ve just spent an hour creating a diffuse and bump map for a 1 inch cylinder. As much as I enjoyed it I can’t help but feel I’m getting a little over obsessed in the details. Using some approximates it doesn’t take long to calculate how long it will take to map the entire scene at that rate:

1 inch cylinder = 10cm²

Approximate area of environment = 72m²

Approximate area of surrounding elements = 5m²

Approximate area of main remaining elements = 2m²

Total are left to map = 79m² (7900cm²)

10cm² = 1 hour

Total time needed for mapping = 790 hours (33 days non stop)

Conclusion = I should probably map faster

Texture Mapping Horstmann the Lamp

This is the finished model of Horstmann… It’s not a particularly complex model and the UVW mapping is also pretty straight forward. This is rendered with a very standard HDRI reflecting background and one-click lighting solution just for demonstrating the model without any special materials applied to it.

Well, as lovely as he looks with his polished glossy surface, it isn’t really the right look for the lamp in the story. Horstmann is old, he’s alone and he needs to look weathered by time.

I have a large collection of reference imagery of the Horstmann and Hadrill lamp and a good amount in battered and bruised condition, which is helpful to get achieve a certain amount of realism when making the textures. I’ve also got a good library of sourced imagery of metals either found on the internet from places like Mayangs free textures or photographed by myself.

Here you can see the texture map for the diffuse colour being built using a number of different source images and a good image of an old lamp to refer to. The UV template is used along with some added notes to guide where to place scatches or built-up dirt and I try to keep the layers seperate to help with the building of specular and bump maps.

Here’s some progress test renders of the diffuse colour map. I have a simple bump map on here as well but this will be worked on properly once the diffuse colour map is looking how I want it, as will the specular and gloss maps.

Wood and lights

Some lighting work in progress renders. I’m actually working on the texture of the wood alongside the lighting. I’m using my Kaiser Idell lamp as a guide for how the light spreads from the head cone.

Thinking about Chiaroscuro, the fine balance of light and shade.

Floor lit without bump texture

Floor lit with bump texture