Advanced Hard Surface Modeling Assignment – UV-mapping and Texturing

Textures and UV-mapping have been occupying all my time this week. After getting through the UV-mapping without going completely insane I was looking forward to start with the texturing since it will bring a bit more life to the model I have been working on for a while now! 

Being inspired by the new Call of Duty game, I decided that phototextures would fit my model the best. So I browsed cgtextures.com to find something that would be similar to the pansar of a tank. Since the website does not have a “armed vehicle” category I had to find something that was close enough. “Aircraft Panels” was close enough and I found some good textures to base my mech on. 

Below is the texture I’ve come to use the most. It has a green hue to it which does not match the hue of a modern M1 Abrams tank, which I’m aiming for. It also has a lot of rivets and bolts which could become a problem for the model. But overall, I think that it could look pretty good with the right shaders. 

The original texture. http://www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=50013&PHPSESSID=h06hjnlueoku3f9ssoli16ame2 

Fortunately, photoshop offers different features to bypass these problems. As for the rivets you can use the Spot Healing Brush Tool which will automatically remove the rivets by gathering color information from the surrounding area and creating surface which match this. 

As for the color, there are several color correction and level correction features to get what you want. The Abrams tank has a yellow/orange hue to it, which is similar to sand or at least what most of use would perceive as sand. Getting this color has proven the most difficult. What looks good in photoshop might not look good in Maya or Unreal Engine 4. From the screenshots of the game we can see that it takes place withing suburban areas, but some of the machines and vehicles still have the “desert” camo. The reasoning behind that might be that the military was not prepared for an attack/war and had to use vehicles from overseas fighting without the time to modify them?

Below is an example of what the texture map looks as of now. The color here looks way to yellow and green. But it is a WIP and I will correct the color as much as possible to get that sand-look.  Currently, I have mostly just filled the map with the textures and I haven’t really started to work on the details of it. I will need to add more imperfections, highlight some areas and add dirt and damage markings to it. 

The texturemap of the Mech (as of this post)

At first, I wanted to create a clean mech which would establish a sense of confidence and superiority. But as I began with the textures I got the feeling that it became to bland. In an all out war, even the most robust machines would get damaged and dirty and it would be shown.

So to make it feel more living, I will add dirt and other imperfections to the it. Even if these won’t be really noticeable at first, I think that the players would appreciate the smaller details as the would come closer and spend more time close to the model.

As for next week, I will continue with the textures and also create the Normal and Specular maps! 

Below is a few snapshots of the mech in UE4.