I decided to texture the medieval crate since I have seen a lot of wooden crates in medieval games but very few that I found memorable. Part of the form with the silhouette with the big planks on the top made it quite unique in my opinion, something people would remember if they see in a game.

As you can see it is mostly brown and wood colored, this is because I was going for a medieval crate and, well they were mostly wood. I made sure that the image I used as base had a good texture to the grain (the texture of the wood)  and a few wider splits that could be used together with the clone brush to quite easily make some quite good looking space between the planks.

I wanted a bit of a warmer color compared to what the image I started with had. So I played around with the hue and saturation tool in Photoshop, turning it from grey to a warmer brown and added a bit of saturation and making it a shade darker. After that I had to even out some of the more inconsistent parts of the colors in the picture a little bit but it was not that much.

Then drawing arrows in different colors on everything, every space on the UV map and inspecting it in 3dsmax, then I added some letters to further clarify how it all worked.

UV checker

Original UV layout

With helplines

Following that I resized and aligned choice parts of the wood texture, building out the main direction of the grain on every part. After that using the clone brush tool I made the grooves between the planks. And then I started trying to line up all the planks with each other so that the actually made sense.

I made some bad choices while doing the optimization also, some pics to explain.

This was not a clever move for instance, not at all.

Also aligning the ends with the flats in a somewhat straight line was a quite irritating piece of work.

Then making some iron nail heads was not that hard, I made one disfigured it a few times into different versions and tried to rotate them so that they did not look all the same.

Lastly I added the cracks around the nails, I made four bases, put them in a layer underneath the nailheads and then fitted them into place with clone brush, healing brush and eraser.

I think that making the colors warm on the crates makes them feel inviting and in a game such as Skyrim or Witcher I always feel a bit turned off when the “normal” crates are in a colder desaturated color scheme, you want the player to feel good and safe about going through the crates, since that is what they are supposed to do, they are supposed to feel invited to go there an go through all the boxes and cupboards in this random persons house… wait what?

Seriously though, the problem with what you can and cannot interact with can in some games be quite irritating and making the intractable objects seem inviting and a easy to pick out is mostly a good thing.

Other than that I think that a darker color also gives more of a feeling of weight and I do want this thing to feel heavy.