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.