3D Course – Assignment 1 reflection (textures)

This is a reflection post about Assignment 1, where I will talk about the textures that I did for the crate. I had to redo the texture once, since it wasn’t that clear what kind of wood it was made of the first time I handed it in, and I will show and talk about both versions.

This was the first texture that I did for the crate:

When I created this texture, I didn’t use any references, and just tried to paint wood and metal from memory. I don’t use references that much or often (except my own visual library/memory) when I work, so I just did as I usually do, but this time it didn’t work out as well as I had hoped.

I recall that I had a really hard time to get it look right, and that it after a while felt like it got worse the more I tried to work on it, so I had to stop and hand it in. When I got the feedback from Nataska, she said that she suspected that my problem was that I didn’t know what kind of wood I wanted to portray, and I agreed.

I had just thought that I would paint a “wood texture”, but not thought that much at all about what kind of wood it should be. It feels really silly that I missed that important thought and detail, but things like that happen sometimes, and I learnt a lesson from this mistake.

So because of the vague wood texture, I redid it. Here’s the second version next to the first one:
This time, I looked up references for mahogany wood boxes before and while working on this crate to get an idea on how to paint the wood. It really made things easier, and this texture took a lot less time to get done than the first one and it wasn’t as troublesome. I had to redo the metal because of the change of colour scheme though (since the wood got a more red hue this time), but it was difficult to find a fitting grey colour to match.

When I looked up mahogany boxes, I think that most of them had more yellow/brass metal details, which probably is because it fits better with the wood’s red hue than a silvery colour. I was thinking of changing it a short while, but then decided not to. I didn’t want to stray too much from the first texture, and I thought that it would be an interesting challenge to try and find that grey too. (Which I think I kind of did?)

Neither the specular nor the normal map went through any dramatic changes in the second version, but since I haven’t talked about them or showed them here on the blog, I will do that now:

A specular map is what decides how the different parts or materials of an object will reflect light. (If it’s glossy or matte.)

With this specular map I tried to make the metal shinier than the wood to make the different materials stand out from each other, but also portray the fact that metal is often shinier than wood. (Or at least reflect light differently). The wood ended up pretty shiny as well, but it was mainly because I wanted it to look varnished, which makes wood look rather glossy.

I didn’t really know how specular maps worked that well back when I did these textures (it was the first time I ever used one), and I think I should try and experiment a bit more with those since I still feel that I’m a bit unsure on this map’s potential. As it is now, it feels like my specular maps make everything look very shiny/glossy, and I think that it would be interesting to see what other effects you can create with the map.

Normal maps are used to make surface details that don’t break the silhouette, and with this crate I mainly focused on accentuating the lock, and only hinted to some other surface details in the normal map.

Now afterwards, I think it would have been interesting to have tried to make some kind of scratches or anything on the chest, but back then I was really unsure about how normal maps worked. I could manage to do some things, like the lock, but I found it very difficult and thought that it all seemed very complicated.

It has gotten easier the more I’ve tried out and worked with normal maps, and I don’t think that it would be a problem now to make details such as a scratch on an object.

Lessons learnt:

I haven’t been working in 3D that much at all before the start of this course and I’ve really learnt a lot from the exercises and the assignment feedback that I’ve gotten.
Something that I thought was really useful that I learnt from this assignment was the importance to plan the UV after how you want to create the texture.

Well, I knew that it was important before, but not all the reasons why. Nataska told me that, if I for example would have wanted to have one shader for the wood parts and another for the metal, the area marked with a blue arrow (image above) would have been troublesome since I’ve painted both wood and metal there. It was just something I did because I thought it looked better and more interesting, and I didn’t think or know that it would matter that much. I know better now, and will have this in mind when working in 3D from now on.

Another lesson I learned from this assignment was the importance of looking up references…I’ve always been a bit lazy with that in general, but I’m realizing it more and more that it really pays off to have some good references to rely on. I had a lot of good photo references when it came to Assignment 2 and it really saved me a lot of time, so it’s something I’ll really try to get better at.

It’s also really good to know what you’re doing/or going to do when you’re creating a texture, which I can’t say I really knew with that first assignment 1 texture.

About Rebecka Nyström

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