3D Computer Graphics I: Week 4

This week has been devoted to the basics of creating a texture for our models. Also, for the theory lesson we got a recap of color theory to refresh and deepen our understanding of color and light. Here I will show my chosen model with its diffuse map and explain how I’ve chosen its look, in terms of visual style and color theory.

I decided to go further with my cartoon style crate for two reasons. First reason is that I like the cartoon style so it gave me a clear vision of what I wanted to do with it. Second is that I believed that it would be one of the easier ones to make a texture for, which would be good as I didn’t know anything about UV-mapping prior to this.

Since the cartoon style is a caricature of reality I felt like going for a caricature style of a regular wooden crate. As a realistic crate would have a standard, desaturated tone of brown, I gave my crate a stronger saturation to make it bright yellow/orange to the tone instead.  It has a very passive color scheme as the crate is made by the same wooden material all over. It’s bright and warm colors gives it the impression of being a non-threatening object which fits perfectly into a cartoon style game.

The box with its diffuse map, rendered in UDK.

I learnt a special thing when it comes to cartoon style props as well as other styles that have distortion and skewedness. The easiest and fastest way to create a skewed prop would be to first create both model and texture as if it were a straight, symmetrical object. That will simplify the process of UV-mapping and texturizing the model immensely. To map my already distorted crate proved to be very time consuming. I had a hard time figuring out how to get the UV checker straight everywhere. It was not possible to make it perfect in some places. It also made things trickier when painting the texture, since I couldn’t use an exact copy of any side for the other. I had to adjust edges manually to fit each side so I just ended up making all the six sides without much copying. Mudbox helped me a great deal to get started on it, though, since I could use a wood-patterned stencil and 3D-paint a lot of the texture at first. The work in Photoshop was a bit trickier as I had to check how I should adjust the edges of the texture for each side and switch in between programs constantly. I am also unsure of whether the resolution is acceptable or not. I think it is slightly on the bad side and want to pay more attention to this for my next model. However, this model might get away with it because it follows a cartoony style and can still look good oversimplified. I am happy with the results though and am frankly surprised with how my first texture turned out. I am looking forward to taking it even further next week when we’re going to look into normal mapping.

The model with UV-Checker on.