Alien Head

Here is my finished Alien head. This was done in Zbrush - a program that began to feel very strange at first, the controls were very different from other programs and the interface was to. It took a few hours to get an idea of how it worked. For this task though I was poly-painting a sculpt provided for the course.
For this I looked at human faces first, to get an idea of skin tones and where the skin got darker or became lighter. It was evident that most of the time redness appeared in the face, around the eyes and on the cheeks. I thought to use this on the head as a flat colour for skin didn't look realistic. As you can see around the eyes is very bright, as is the lower jaw. Although jaws were not displayed as overly bright features I figured that the alien would of frequently used his for expressiveness in a game/eating people.
For the top and back of the head I went for a much duller colour, getting darker and moving away from the red, I feel as though the contrast here makes the head stand out really well. The spine I painted black as well to give it that embossed look. I also made the eyes pure black so the alien could give a lifeless stare.
For the teeth I decided to apply a cream base colour and then a brown to contrast against the cream making the teeth look unclean. I applied a patterned texture in Zbrush to apply to the forehead and used a low opacity texture for the face.
Overall I am very pleased with the result. I'm sure when learning about Zbrush in future modules I can look back and identify some mistakes I have made for this, and I can also use what I have learned in poly painting for then to.
Overall this unit in general has helped a tremendous amount. I have learned how to create much better looking textures, as before in the previous unit I just slapped photo textures on and even though it worked it didn't look anywhere as good as the textures I can often create now. I applied most of this to the CGM module when creating the construction vehicle and managed to make a good looking vehicle texture using similar methods to what was presented to us in texture development. I am looking forward to using Zbrush more and during my break I will look up how to sculpt in it.

Completed cottage

Here is the final result for my cottage. It took a lot of tinkering with what to use on certain parts of the cottage as sometimes I'd used too much of a certain material and it would overwhelm the whole thing. This was a common occurrence with the icing for instance when I attempted to create the roof out of icing it wouldn't look right.
I decided to opt for a base foundation of chocolate cake, I used a sponge texture and repeated it around the house. I also outlined 3 layers of chocolate icing with a simple brown brush to represent the 'cement'. I used gingerbread walls - using the same texture I used for the door and allowed them to repeat around the house.
For the pillars I decided to use a gingerbread base, followed by a candy cane tube, into an icing pinnacle. I decided to use very clean textures for this, as when I tried to add some wear and tear it looked out of place. It needed to look in pristine condition to appear effective.
For the center bits of the walls, I decided to use icing - I first opted for the candy cane pattern but there was already enough of that so I decided to go with a repeated gumdrop pattern, these were hand painted onto the building, I would of created them onto the model but I wasn't sure if I was allowed to add additional features.
The roof was a challenge, I tried so many things, icing, candy cane, gingerbread, gumdrops, a thatched decorative pattern and a few others. But eventually I stumbled upon an example that used cake as the roof. I figured why not try it so i borrowed the sponge texture I used for the foundations and added some light brown paint to tile the rooftop so it appeared as though it was a brownie created roof.
Finally I added a green glow to the windows to give a festive impression.
Overall I'm very pleased with the result, I think its a different interpretation of the cottage and I think despite there not being the 'perfect' model shapes for certain aspects of the building such as square candy canes, I did a good job at representing it. I had a lot of fun creating the texture for this. 

Cottage Door

This is the first part of the cottage, I initially began this door with a straight forward normal wooden door, with various weathering on it. However midway through the texturing I decided to scrap the idea and take a chance with something that I believed was more interesting and unique. I decided to do a gingerbread house.
I looked up a lot of images of gingerbread houses, there were plenty to view and each had unique aspects to them. For now though I just focused on the door. I saw ones with brownie doors, icing gates, candy cane gates and gingerbread doors. The ones that caught my eye though were the gingerbread doors as some had the panels etched out by icing dripping down the door, this was something I was keen to include with my door. I used a few textures to create the gingerbread texture, the main thing to make sure of was that was that the textures were not too busy, so high pass was a good help for this.
For the door handle and frame I chose to go with an icing base followed by candy cane red lines. The outline of green was a common theme that I noticed throughout a few gingerbread houses.
I'm very pleased with the result, its nice and bright and is interesting to look at, but I'm sure the cottage as a whole will really set it off aslong as I can maintain the theme and colour scheme.

Tiling floor

Here is my tile-able floor. I did enjoy creating this, although the floor engraving was a repeated shape for quite a few squares on the Photoshop grid. I decided to go with a different pattern for the floor, i had to change the alpha channel slightly to what was there in the power-point guide but I managed to receive some good results.
It tiles fairly well, other than a slight issue with the side 'hazard' lines which I tried to fix a few times before getting it to look the closest to its best.
In order to achieve the metal texture I used a few different textures, mainly changing the layer modes/using various filters such as high pass on certain ones. I would also lower the opacity on layers to allow more to be seen beneath the layer modes. I topped the texture off with a scratched surface texture and it gave the floor some occlusion.
Altogether I was very pleased with the result and look forward to continuing with learning effective methods of creating surfaces.

UV'ing and texturing of a Sci-Fi crate

This task was different to the others as the model was already made for us. The difference was that we were provided with a high poly model and a low poly model. The task being to bake the normal map of the high poly crate onto the low poly crate to make it appear as though it was a high poly crate.  The first part was organising the UV's. I looked at the presented method of laying them out and tried to mimic what I could see, there were a few exceptions though when I mapped it. 

I used X-normals and created an Ambient Occlusion map of the crate and also created a normal map of both of the meshes, it copied the high poly details onto a low poly UV map making it appear as though it was heavily detailed. As for the texture I used the AO map to aid me and overlayed multiple textures and altered them slightly with clone stamp and smudge. I used a variety of rusted metals, glass and even marble to create the desired effect. I reduced the saturation of the textures as though they were colorless and altered the layer modes to create the texture seen below. I was very pleased with the result. I wanted to add some decals to the crate to make it interested and went for some simple lines which i made sure were worn away using various eraser brushes. I also added dirt to the parts of the crate i felt would attract the most dirt and added some text to give the crate a purpose. I also added some graffiti in as though it had been sitting there unused for some time. 

  For the final Render I was really thrilled with the result. The marble texture I felt made it look cell shaded and the details on the crate were outlined. I tried adding more decals to the crate but felt it didn't enhance it in any way.

Spellbook Model and Texture

After my enjoyment of the crate I was assigned the task of modelling and texturing a spellbook. Modelling this was slightly trickier than the crate but still enjoyable. I had to create bends in the book to make it appear realistic and to keep it exciting to look at, as a flat book would be boring. The spine has curvature and the pages bend inwards slightly. As for texturing the book it went okay, i used a few textures and overlayed them to create the leather effect of the book whilst using the clone stamp tool to adjust these internet sourced images. I used different kinds of brushes to create the markings around the frame of the book whilst using a rather jagged eraser brush to take of random parts as if it had been worn away over time. For the wooden texture I hand painted the markings onto a photo source plain wooden material. I flipped the UV's on the wood so they do not appear identical. The pages were a few overlayed textures and playing around with the layer modes. I wanted gold pages to contrast with the cover. I found using a bright gold was too garish and nullified it. It made it look much better.  

 For the final render I was pleased with the result. I went for a simplistic look with the book, as in I had no text on the book rather an illustration. I embossed the illustration to make it stand out. As for the clamps I felt as though the book would not of been sealed with a button or a clip rather wooden clamps.

Week 1 - Crate Model and Texture.

For the first week of Texture Development, we were assigned the task of modelling and texturing a common game item - a crate. The modelling was easy as we discovered an effective method of extruding a single flat plane and then duplicating the plane to form the shape of a cube. Texturing was fun as a wood texture was something I implemented into my vending Machine from Intro to 3D last term. I felt what I lacked there was the knowledge to add effects to the layers and overlay the textures. I tried to do this with the crate and used 'drop shadow' and 'outer glow' to enhance aspects of the crate. I made the crate look worn as though the wood had started to weather. 

Here is the final render of my crate. I used two different crate textures for them, one of my crate textures was ever so slightly darker so it didn't look too repeated. I am very pleased with the outcome and learning this method to create an easy crate in Maya and how to make an effective wood texture.