Creating Materials for the Cart

15-16/12/21 - Week 11

Before starting to texture my cart & scene, I needed to create some materials in designer. There ended up being quite a few of these which are all very important.

I started out with the most important of these, the material for the cart. I studied the cart and with the knowledge that these textures are purely just a base material, I generalised the roughness, colour and pattern. To create this, it was just a basic wood pattern with a bit of a shiny roughness and some slight gradient on the colour/roughness to hopefully make it a bit easier to create the gradients you can see on each plank of wood.

The ease of the wood was very much contrasted by the difficulty I had with the wicker baskets. The weaving on the majority of the basket wasn't too hard and I ended up making it by just using the weave generator. What was difficult here was trying to make them look more round, since the weave generator could only produce a straight pattern. I tried to use some levels and shading techniques to try to get it to look more like my references but in the end I left it as it was, adding some roughness variation, warp and defects to make it look more realistic. I am a bit disappointed I didn't get this more accurate.

Increasingly difficult was the tops of the basket, they have a different type of weave that I just couldn't recreate for some reason. Eventually I found a tutorial for some rope that had the same sort of pattern, this included warping a circle and mirroring to create the elongated s shape curve. I had tried many ways of creating this including warping lines and other shapes but eventually I managed to create the shape I wanted. Though again, this is not perfect.

To create a texture for some of the wooden crates, it was a very simple case of warping some noise to create the splintery cheap wood texture.

Again moving on to something a bit more complicated was the texture for the pineapple. I was having a tough time trying to create the 5/6 sided shape and getting it to tile correctly. In the end I had to go with a 6 sided shape and it was a little less realistic. I then just combined many shapes and gradients through trial and error to try to recreate the surprisingly complex skin of a pineapple. Adding colour to this was difficult as it took me quite a long time to get the colours looking something like a pineapple. I am hoping once this is applied to the fruit and how far it will be scaled down it will look a lot more realistic and readable as a pineapple.

Finally, to finish off with an easy one, I created the painted wood texture for the shop front. This was very simple but I did end up making it a bit more peeling and old than the reference shows as I thought that this would help add a lot of variation immediately instead of trying to add more generators and smart masks once in painter.