Games Art and Design NUA : BA6

Texturing My Environment | Pt1 - Wooden Posts

Okay so I’m sure we are all sick and bored of me over documenting the UV process of my environment, so lets get started with the textures!! Yaaay. I decided that the first part of the environment I was going to texture would be the wooden support posts of the bridge. I don’t feel like tackling the rope just yet ;)

First of all I wanted to gather some general aesthetic references for how wood would appear in the jungle environments in which my hypothetical “mysterious” environment scene would be found in game. This way I would know how to edit my textures in order to achieve and accurate representation. (You’ll have to look through the watermarks, I’m not trying to steal these images, they’re NOT mine. I just think they are really helpful wood references).

image source

My first port of call is to browse http://www.cgtextures.com for wood textures similar to that of my reference images to ensure my textures are accurate. I found a few that I really like.

I begin by setting up my ambient occlusion texture map with my UV snap shot and adding a base layer of colour. I decide to make my base layer a mid grey tone with a hint of brown as I am going to start texturing wood. I put my UV snapshot at the top of the layer hierarchy in Photoshop and set the layer to “screen”. I then had the ambient occlusion underneath set as “multiply” then finally, at the bottom, is my base layer set as normal.

I then applied the wood texture that I chose over the large wooden support beam’s UV’s. I applied a lambert material to the wood supports in Maya as lambert causes the least shine and reflection; wood isn't shiny or overly reflective, so I thought this would be the best thing to use. I then applied my texture file to the model to see how it looked. Generally I was really happy with it, I think the texture is strong enough to not need tons of tweaking or editing, however, there was a seam (which I always knew I would get).

To try and hide this seam I went back into Photoshop to edit the texture. I took a copy of the right side of the texture and moved it to the opposite side.

I then used the clone stamp to blend the new part into the image.

Here is a before and after where I have tried to blend the seam together.

However this created a repeated pattern on my textures which, in my opinion, is even worse than the seam >:|

So I went back into Photoshop and used the clone stamp again to try and make the area smaller that I had just created to cause less of a repeat.

Whilst not 100% perfect, a definite improvement here. Plus I am looking up close, this isn’t where the player would be focussing anyway so I’m not too worried about it currently.

Okay now to tackle the tops and bottoms of the log stumps. Here are the textures which I like.

After some editing in Photoshop I was left with diffuse maps that looked like this.

Moving onto the next set of wooden supports, I wanted to re use the same texture so I gave that a go. However, when I looked at them, I noticed a really obvious repeat in a pattern (THEY LOOK LIKE THEY ARE SMILING :D)

So I went into Photoshop to fix it.

Continuing work on the second set of wooden support beams I started to texture the top. The texture is the best wood stump I could find that I liked but it is too orange in tone and colour compared to the actual wood itself (no, I’m not cool enough to actually figure out what tree this wood is from and match it haha) so I used Photoshop to change the colour as well as vibration, saturation and hue. I also used the clone stamp to add some moss colour to the top to blend it in more.

I then repeated this process but for the other stump and also copied the same textures onto the bottoms as they aren't even really visible.

And here is a render.

Because I am using the same set of textures I noted originally for the wooden bridge supports, I wont post a step by step of what I have done from now on. I have detailed enough of the process for you to understand. I simply rinse and repeat, editing textures as I go, so ill post WIP renders for the rest of the wooden posts unless something desperately needs blogging.