3D I – Textured Crate

This week we were supposed to take one of the themed crates we created a couple of weeks ago and apply diffuse maps on it.

When I created the model I was going for the Contemporary Urban theme, so after a bit of pondering I decided on making something along the lines of a fruit- or farmers crate, focusing more on the basic function of the crate rather than something lavish.

The crate with an applied UV-Checker.

As for the coloration I went with, I had intentionally intended to go for “healthier” yellow/orange colored wood so that the crate could still appear quite useable, but I happened to stumble across a nice texture of greyish aged wood instead. So instead I decided to go for an older crate that’s seen the best of its years.
Or to be perfectly honest, what I really wanted was a mahogany fruit crate, something for the very fanciest of fruit-traders! But once I found the more traditional aged wood I decided to go with that.

The diffuse map.

So grey quite naturally became the main color of the entire crate, with minor additions of rusty red for the nails. Overall the choice of color itself isn’t something that will make people look at it in awe, but I do think that the texturing itself, for a first try, is pretty decent.
At least I found myself looking at it, perhaps a bit more than I should, thinking to myself that it didn’t look very bad at all.

Crate with applied diffuse map – as seen in UDK!

There was no particular reason to why I chose the main color grey concerning special significance, other than the fairly obvious connotations of wear, tear, age and decay.
After a quick look at suggestions of the color grey’s meaning, it was stated that grey was the color of least emotional significance, only really conveying a slight dampening of the mood and in extreme cases depression.
I suppose this would work quite well with a discarded, degrading crate. It could most likely have been accentuated a bit more though had I modeled the crate as being damaged.

Although the texture of aged wood I found was virtually entirely grey, it wasn’t entirely desaturated. It still maintains some of the woods original yellow/orange, though barely enough that you would notice.
This became quite apparent as I had to find a cross section of a tree to finish the edges of the boards. This cross section was originally a very vibrant yellow, but had to be desaturated and lightened to fit the rest of the wood. It could however not be entirely desaturated since that made it loose the very last of its vibrance, making it very dull indeed.

I did actually think about adding a bit of lichens to the model as well, perhaps ones in a rather nice yellow tone, but I wasn’t entirely sure how to add another layer of textures for this. I could have added it directly to the diffuse map, but odds are that it would have been very easily noticeable that the lichens repeated, other than on the bottom boards.