Environment Texturing Assignment

Proposal

For this texturing assignment I intend to unwrap and texture a futuristic environment inhabited by robots. The art direction will point towards a destroyed, deserted world. Textures used will reflect this. During this exercise I plan to develop my unwrapping techniques as well as proficiency towards texturing. By the end of this I will be able to identify areas of a model that need adjusting whilst unwrapping; I will be able to present an art direction through textures in a scene; and I will also be able to efficiently unwrap a model as I will have a go to process to use when it comes to unwrapping.

While the environment provided is futuristic, I don’t want everything within the scene to be of pristine quality. With this being the case, the art direction will point towards a more destroyed, deserted world, with noticeable wear (rust, cracks) on buildings and dormant robots. The fact the world (or immediate area) is deserted points towards disaster - traces of this can be seen as liquid spills on the floor, cracks in walls etc. In order to use textures such as these, I may have to create my own within Photoshop.

Smoke and sparks can also be placed into final renders to give a larger sense of destruction and wear on the environment. Alpha channels and transparency can be used on areas with grids or cracks in order to see through them or add more detail to a surface (such as indents).

This concept was inspired by games such as Horizon: Zero Dawn and Borderlands. While Horizon offers a more realistic take in it’s art direction featuring: vibrant colours; realistic textures; and fairer shaders. Borderlands differs and brings forth a cartoon style with: flatter colour; thick outlines; and harder shaders. Textures used for this scene will be of a cartoon style, similar to what is present in Borderlands.

I plan to present my work as a series of renders each showing different angles of the scene.

Pre-Production

During pre-production I created multiple mood boards in order to visualise what I wanted certain objects would look like when they were textured. In total I created five different mood boards all showing different colour and texture ideas for the buildings, walls, floor, and robots. These mood boards helped when I was struggling to apply colours to differing models, for example, switching from colouring a building's UV shells to a robots was a change in style and colour palette - referring to the mood boards allowed me to get on track with the model I was working with.

I also learnt about the different resolutions of textures: 512px (low), 1024px (medium - 1k), 2048 (high - 2k). Alphas were also discussed. Alphas are a black and white image in which the white portion of the image will push outwards and the black portion will push inwards

Also during pre-production I learnt how to efficiently unwrap a model and check for unwanted abnormalities in the mesh. When unwrapping a model, my go-to method when unwrapping a model is to first apply a UV Unwrap to the model(s) I will be unwrapping during the session and use flatten mapping in the UV Editor to see if the unwrap is usable. If the unwrap is usable then I will render it and begin colouring/applying textures to it. If the unwrap is unusable I will use point-to-point seams on the model and projection tools in the UV Editor in order to correct any stretching; in order to check for stretching I apply a checker material to the model and set tiling to 20 x 20.

Texturing Experimentation & Progress

For this exercise I am texturing one of the windows found on the buildings. As I am aiming for a more cartoon-esque style I will be experimenting with black outlines throughout the textures of the models. I began by rendering and exporting the UV template and began colouring the shells in Paint Tool Sai. Firstly I began by adding black outlines to the shells and took the template back into 3DS Max to see how it looked. I first discovered I could use outlines like these when I had previously coloured and rendered a different model and saw the green UV shell lines were still present. Tracing over them gave the results found below.

When applying the texture I ran into a problem where the green outlines of the UV shells were showing through the outlines. To solve this I made the black outlines of the texture thicker. Examples of this can be seen above, where I was experimenting with this method on the small robots. While this does work as a fix to the problem, in some areas the outlines appear thicker than in others.

After resolving this issue I began to draw effects onto the window such as: rust, oil marks, and scratch marks. I used different brush densities to make the brush softer or harder depending on what I wanted to apply to the surface of the object. Oil would be hard where as scratches would be soft. Finished renders of the robot can be seen below.

Wilst at college I continued to outline UV shells in Photoshop. As I am not as familiar with Photoshop as I am with Paint Tool Sai, my workflow was slowed down for a short period of time.

I used a number of methods in order to apply the outlines, the first being freehand with a graphics tablet. This resulted in messy lines which looked unprofessional both on the shells and rendered in Max. The second method was clicking once with the brush tool selected, holding shift and clicking again in another location; Photoshop automatically placed a straight line between the two locations, speeding my workflow up remarkably - resulting in more professional shells and renders. The final method was to select the UV layer in Photoshop by Ctrl+left clicking it, extending the selected area by 1px and using the brush tool to paint in the selected area. This is the fastest workflow, only taking seconds to complete compared to 15 - 20 minutes for the previously mentioned methods.

The results of this final method are the same as the second: clean outlines which add a stylised appearance to the models in Max.

Once all the shells had been outlined they were applied to their respective models and I began the colouring process. For less complex models such as the tyre, less time went into the colouring process as tyres tend to have a small colour palette. Unfortunately I could not use the fastest method in Paint Tool Sai and

I next moved onto the walls, adding black outlines where necessary. Number decals were added to the walls to give a more industrial appearance to the area; they were later dirtied up and worn to show their age. I added geometry to the walls to resemble metal plating where the decals were placed. Substance was then used to bake the _high model to the _low model to have them pop out. Both _low and _high objects were exported from 3DS Max as FBX files.

Both _low and _high versions of the Outer_Wall object were created (high has the geometry for the metal plating); very slight extrusions and bevels were used on the _high version. In the baking options I imported the _high file and set the Frontal and Rear distance sliders accordingly. Below are the results of the baking.

I did have some trouble while creating the hires bake of this model, mainly on the 3DS Max side when creating the small extrusions for the bake. I created the extrusions after finishing and applying the wall texture so I had to redo the texture from the beginning; even though it's a simple texture I had trouble with the 01 and 02 decals not aligning or showing in the correct places. I quickly fixed this by checking in the UV Editor for what face of the UV was where and applied the needed changes in order to correct the texture.

During early stages of developing textures for the scene, I originally wanted the humanoid robot featured in the centre of the scene to be in good condition and spotless. I changed my mind on this matter whilst colouring the shell of the robot's head, adding a faint layer of black over the shell. When applied to the model, this black, oily, layer adds more personality and character to the robot and is overall more appealing to look at. I eventually added this feature to the small, one wheeled robots too as well as the bunkers. Adding the effect to the bunkers gave the scene a greater sense of abandonment and ruin.

Above are examples taken from a part of the small robot's claw that was coloured and applied late into production.

When texturing the small robots I had to delete some of them because their claws were overlapping as there was not enough room for them all in the room they were placed in. As many of the objects in the scene were the same model I only had to colour one shell of the corresponding model and then apply that shell to all the models after they had all been unwrapped.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I am pleased with how the final textured scene is presented, I am also pleased with the theme I chose for this assignment. This theme was one I was having second thoughts about early on, although as I continued texturing the scene I began to enjoy this theme more. Tracing the shells in order to obtain the outlines was incredibly time consuming and slowed down my workflow before a faster method was found. Before this faster method, I was spending more time on outlines than colouring shells. Discovering a work around, however, shows my progress with texturing for this type of style. I am glad I developed not only texturing skills, but some Photoshop skills as well. If I was to do this again I would spend more time on researching this style and finding more references to base my work off. I would also spend more time experimenting in Substance Painter, adding more hires bakes to the scene (for example: the walls; floor; and small robots).