Cabinet

Listening to Nils Frahm. Glass colours and textures.

Horstmann Mapped

Okay, Horstmann is now mapped and shaded… He’ll continue to change but not by huge amounts. I might change his colour but for now I feel that a hugely desaturated finish will build more contrast between him and the colourful butterfly trails. Well anyway… Here’s Horstmann:

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.

Adding Texture

My friend Garrick is moving house. His room is now but an empty shell of memories… I’m listening to Ólafur Arnalds and reminiscing of some great times. Anyway, I took the opportunity to get some last minute photos of his floor boards to use as texture maps for the room where Horstmann resides. I’ve used some wooden textures from the stairway before in ‘The Fool’, the house is three Victorian stories of hidden visual treasures.

Most of the reference imagery I’ve collected for the design of the room is of prison cells so I’m not sure whether I’ll be using the textures but they’ll definitely be used as a proxy surface to help development of the lighting and environment.

Getting good photos to use as textures requires a different approach than normal but I didn’t plan on taking any photos for textures so I had to improvise a little. The lighting is extremely important when taking texture photos as you don’t really want it to affect the surface colour at all. The lighting of all of the objects will probably be done within the scene using 3D lights so it’s best to think of the texture map as a surface colour with no lighting on it. To achieve this can be very difficult as you need light in order to expose the surface colour… Well… This has turned into some kind of tutorial… Anyway… Natural daytime diffuse lighting is normally the best solution to get good even lighting over a surface but in situations such as indoors or if it’s dark you may need to use a flash to get enough light to capture the image. This can cause crisp shadows or specular highlights which should be avoided for good clean surface colour. A removable flash pointed at the ceiling can be enough or using a translucent object in front of the flash to diffuse the light around the room rather than directly at the surface and back into the lens. My solution was a plastic bag crudely screwed up and put over the flash with the flash on maximum. There’s still a lot of reflective glow in the center of the image but it’s much better then it could have been and after a little editing in Photoshop I should have a quick rough texture map to start working with.

This is a raw image with the central glow from the flash and a little lens distortion.

This is a quick retouched version removing the glow and distortion.

This is a small section of a much larger texture map made from many images like the one above and additional wooden textures from previous projects. The full image is large enough to cover the whole floor surface and should hold up at HD resolutions when the camera is quite close. I’ve also widened the gaps between the planks a little… I think it will look nice when it’s picked out by Horstmann’s light… I’m going to be looking at the lighting next, so I guess we’ll soon see.