Texturing the Cart & Shopfront

 17-24/12/21 - Week 11/12

Over these past few days, I have begun texturing for the cart project after creating my base materials.

I first started with the cart since I felt this was the most important factor of the project and getting this done would be very helpful.

This is probably the part I am most pleased with, it was mainly just a case of studying where the dirt and flaws lay on the references and trying to recreate this. I ended up using quite a lot of hand painting and different grunges with a lot of roughness variation to get the colour and age of the wood correct.

Next, I moved on to the fruit. These were pretty fun to texture though did take me a while as it took me a lot of time to make sure each one looked how I wanted it to. The pineapple skin texture was definitely helpful and I like how it looks but the unwrap caused the texture to warp quite harshly and I couldn't find a way to fix this. Obviously the fruit are quite small on the map so it was hard to get a lot of detail onto them, but I still think what I have created is sufficient.

The crates and baskets where probably the hardest of the lot as I had to play with transparency and also create some textures for the cardboard boxes. I ended up creating the transparency by making a normals map with very small parameters whilst I was baking with opacity, this allowed me to create islands that I could take into photoshop and easily make the parts I wanted white and the parts I didn't, black. I then just applied this as a texture making it an opacity mask.

Both wooden boxes just needed some age added to them and I also added the staples or nails using the pre-existing painter functions. The wicker basket was rather similar though I did struggle a bit with how I had unwrapped it as it was causing the texture to be warped on each side so I ended up having to have many variations of my base material to correct it.

For the cardboard boxes I went into photoshop and tried to recreate the fruit textures that I saw on the reference just as I felt it added some bright colours and a lot more realism, this didn't end up being too difficult. Once I'd finished this was just a case of adding it as a texture to painter and sizing it.

The shop was interesting to texture as I noticed on my reference that it had a sort of gradient and this was hard to balance as I wanted it to show but too harsh would make it appear washed out and confusing. I chose a fake name and slogan for my shopfront and tried to get it as close to that timeframe's fonts and style. I struggled a bit to get this to make this look interesting but I think I managed to figure it out in the end.

I also textured the bottles and shelving to prepare for baking this onto a plane for my shopfront window. I made very basic or altered versions of the bottles, cans and pots that I could see in my reference and made a couple variations so that the shop would look more realistic and full. I plan to bake this plane and the fruit in marmoset.

I also somehow forgot that I would be texturing the foliage and I had also forgotten one of my wooden crate props, so I decided to throw this onto what will be a 512 sheet and texture it. This is quite frustrating as I definitely had room on at least one of my texture sheets, I have been finding some glitches when trying to add geometry to the file in painter however, so I thought this way would be quicker and easier.

I had some issues with baking here as when I exported from zbrush I didn't decimate the tree leaves enough so I ended up with a very high poly mesh. I tried doing this in marmoset at first as I know it is better for baking onto planes but I didn't think the results were good enough, so instead I used painter. It did take a while to bake but after playing with some settings I was able to get a nice bake. I plan to use the singular leaf plane to apply to the tree to make it look more realistic and interesting.

Overall, I am pleased with most of my textures though I did experience some issues or some things that I didn't remember to counter in. A lot of this was to do with how I had split my maps up and was trying to texture, namely the fruit and baskets. I decided to bring in the fruit first then later add my crates. This provided problems as it messed up a lot of my masks. I didn't realise that painter uses "world space" and not the uv's for physical paint, which I had a lot of, and would basically clear all my masks. It was rather frustrating though in the end I managed to come up with a work around.

These small problems cost me a lot of time and I think I was quite slow texturing everything as a whole. Next, I will move on to baking the groups of fruit and shop front to get my project finalised and ready to present in unreal.