Texturing the crate/chest

Hello! This blog post is going to be about the texturing of one of my crates. We were supposed to choose one of our three crates to do a diffuse, Specular and normal map on. I chose to texture my crate which I spent the most time on and the one that I am the happiest with, my crate/chest with a lid. When I first made my chest I was trying to go for a cartoonish feel to it. Unfortunately I don’t think that it turned out especially cartoonish. I ended up going for more of a medieval look to the chest.

I got very inspired while I was looking at reference pictures on the internet of old style trunks and chests. The trunks were made out of wood which has been lacquered and polished. I really like the color of darker and redder shades of wood, so I wanted to incorporate that into the texture which I was making for my chest. The trunks that I had been looking at on the internet also had metal painted black holding them together. The crate was not exactly supposed to look new either, in the end it ended up looking more like something from the medieval era.

I tried making the metal holding the chest together to look old by making it bumpy, as if it had been painted over and over again many times as the paint got worn of and then renewed again. I also wanted it to look like they had painted over rust which was on the metal.

I wanted the hinges and lock on the chest to look like brass which had seen some use, not exactly damaged, but I wanted to make it look like it had been around for a long time. So I tried to make them look like they were not in perfect condition.

I was pretty happy with the wood texture which I had found. I felt like it was missing something though. On the lid part I decided to make it look like there were separate wooden planks, and not just a big sheet of wood. I did this by painting on black lines, and then shading the surrounding wood a little bit to make the planks look rounded at the bottom. I’m not thrilled about how it turned out, but I think it gets the message across.

Here is a picture of the chest in 3D max unrendered.

Here is a picture of what the chest looks like using the in-built render in 3Ds Max. This render is taken only with the basic texture applied.

This is my final model in wireframe-mode, in 3DS Max.

This is my final model in 3DS Max with a UV checker applied.
The UV checker is used to check and adjust the sizes of the different parts in your UV editor. I ended up adjusting the tiling. At first the squares were far too big and it was very difficult to see if everything was scaled properly. After fixing the tiling I had no problem