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.
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.
