Texture/Material Studies

Perfectblue

Recently I have been doing HP objects, unwrapping them and baking them and moving onto another project neglecting texturing. I have very little texturing experience and what I do have is very weak and the goal of this thread is to help change that by posting texture/material studies and gaining feedback from the community.


With that being said open the flood gate, here is my first study a metal wall panel.


No specific references for this. outside metal is supposed to be brushed metal. The middle panel is a matte painted piece. I referenced Philipks tutorial as I worked through this here http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/metalmatte/metalmatte.html

Amadreaus

Metal tends to rely on lighting in many cases to fully realize the material sense. If you can show this perhaps repeating on a wall with some localized light sources, it'll help to show how your spec is working within the material.

Perfectblue

@Amadreaus, went ahead and added a repeat tiling image of the wall with additional lights as you requested to the original post.

tharle

firstly i'd say that the round bits in the corner of the panel look too big - looking at the tutorial i think they supposed to be fixings and you wouldnt get fixings that big imo. I'd guess they were made of metal too but you have them completely flat in your specular map.

talking of your spec map theres a lot of colour in it. some surfaces do have coloured highlights (mostly metals like brass or copper) but generally i'd just stick with simple b/w spec and just colour sparingly to boost its effect.

looking at your painted stripes they seem very flat - they're basically just a flat colour in the diffuse, spec and gloss maps and dont appear at all in the normal. looking at the tutorial you linked there's a lot more detail and variation in the large flat areas that help interest the eye. you've made a start in that direction with the chips in the paintwork but i think it needs more variation and more smaller details like scratches etc.

note also in his normal how there's a very slight variation across the whole panel that helps to break up the computer generated look of it.

lastly notice that his gloss map and his spec map are only based on the diffuse texture - they both have details in them which are unique to them, rather than just being lighter or darker versions of the components of the diffuse layer. on some surfaces that can be fine but metal is generally quite unforgiving and needs variations in spec and gloss seperate from the diffuse to really sell it imo.

overall i would say its a good start and just needs a little more detail. Photoshop filters and blend modes are you friends here - dont be afraid to get whatever source texture you need to get good dirt and scratches, just because you're making a painted metal surface doesnt mean you cant use a nice desaturated concrete texture to get some interesting dirt effects etc.

Computron

Where can I find good photo source for dirt and grime like tharle mentioned?

Perfectblue

tharle wrote: »

firstly i'd say that the round bits in the corner of the panel look too big -

Thanks for the feedback tharle. In regards to the bolts I am not trying to 100% replicate what Phillip has already made, just using that as reference and studying the work flow. The bolts on my wall panel may be large, but the main point of this exercise was texturing. I modeled out the HP and baked it in about 3 minutes.

Computron wrote: »

Where can I find good photo source for dirt and grime like tharle mentioned?

http://www.cgtextures.com/
http://lostandtaken.com/gallery
http://mayang.com/textures/
deviantart.com

passerby

ya you should add some variation textures to just your specular texture, ad well as some scratches to just the specular, than you should do a bit of the same in the gloss but also in the gloss put in things like finger smudges and bit of grime, there are a lot of things that can get on metal, like oil from your hands that don't effect the colour much or at all but do effect the specular and exponent.

also all of this will add interest to the material since you get to discover new things in the material from viewing it on different angles, and moving the light source around.