3D Week 4 – A Chest of Gold

Greetings!

This week I’ve been working on the diffuse texture for the medieval chest model. Diffuse texture being the colors of the object.

I went with a realistic sort of style. A chest that is in a wealthy person’s possession during the middle ages. Perhaps more beautiful than practical.

I used a simple color scheme that has a lot of red in it just because of red being a very rare and expensive color during those times. The colors are rather saturated in an attempt to make it look like it was made rather recent. The dominant color is gold, gold that covers the brown of the wood. The interior of the chest is decorated with silk to hold whatever possessions the man owning the chest has.

My idea behind the whole chest is that perhaps it was made for richer men but it isn’t that very well made. Unlike its more expensive brothers, this chest was originally made out of wood and not metal through and through, it only has a gold coating over the wood.

The colors are all warm and saturated to enforce the look that it might be new. Or, something old made new, as a wooden chest getting a golden coating and some small polishes here and there.

I can tell you now that my hand hurt something fierce after drawing the ornament pieces of this texture. It was a real struggle, luckily I could copy+paste a lot of it. But there was still enough to make me take breaks in between to rest my hand. Looking at the layout of the texture now towards the end, I can see that there are ton of space that I didn’t use and I almost want to remake it just to fix that problem, but that would also waste a lot of time right now. At least it is something I’ll remember for future projects, and perhaps I’ll get some time fix the layout at a later date.

But back on the subject of color.

As I said I imaged this chest being a cheap knock off to fool the rich. So originally it would have just a simple wooden color that then had been coated in a golden colored metal. The maker would have only this material and the silk, so they would use it to its full potential. Therefor the colors are minimal and only the brown of wood, the gold of the coating, and the red of silk. There are still some corrections I would like to do to the texture such as contrast fixes, details, and the like. But as it is now is still the base for it all.

It will be very interesting next week when I’ll start working on the normal and specular map. It is always fun to see your texture being given depth and start to pop out. I have not done it that much, so it will be interesting to see how it works out.

Here is the chest with the “checker pattern” a simple texture to help see that there are no distortions or weird scaling issues that need to be addressed before starting work on the texture. It was very handy when setting up the UV map.

And that is all I have to say about that.

Have a good one!