Week 07
Finalizing textures following continuous feedback from the team.
Breakdown of individual assets:
For the side face of the spool - I found a reference online and extracted enough information from the image to create color and normal maps. The source was skewed so I had to use perspective and puppet warp tools in photoshop to create the circular map.
From there I created a row of tickets for the outer edge that were individually numbered. I also layered various paper textures in the normal maps to recreate the physical prop texture.
The cash register didn’t need to be fully detailed as it’s a midres prop, however, there’s still plenty of roughness detail to break up the specular highlights.
For the admissions sign on the glass, I found a close source image to make an alpha mask in Illustrator. I omitted unnecessary detail and adjusted the prices to match our ticket props.
The glass shader was tricky to troubleshoot. I ended up using a combination of aiFacingRatio and aiRange nodes to create a a color mask in the shader so the the admission sticker was opaque and the glass was transmissive. When this file was handed off to my team, a further adjustment to fit the lighting was made. The roughness map was also routed into specular roughness in combination to the coat roughness in the screenshot below.
Main stages of the texture iterations
color block out - test shaders - near final shaders
Final feedback alteration was to reduce the contrast of the wear marks on the red painted wood. In addition to a handful of smaller dirt contrast changes.
After a group discussion it was decided the the original curtain geometry was the last obvious indicator that it was a cg asset. Texturing could not overcome the low detail mesh so a team decision was made to replace them. To overcome the low-res curtains, I kitbashed various source meshes from Archive3d. This allowed me to revise the wall tie-back which bothered me in the original mesh.
To reduce polys, I deleted the interior fibers of the tassel and replaced them with a cylinder to appear thick. This removed 25k unnecessary polys.
When compared, the new kitbash geo surpassed the original curtain set. While this was a last minute change in proximity to the cg deadline, this is an essential revision to increase realism.
