Materials and texturing help

razzta91

Hallo

I hope is it the right place to post, if not, kill me, aaaarrrhh just kidding

I could really use some help with this one, I hope you guys can help me


Im making a house, and all the modelling is done, so next thing is texturing and Im really bad at texturing

So I could really use some tips and tricks for this one

One of my reference is this one:
http://www.glue-it.com/houses/gallery/panfilo.html

and it is something like that Im looking for, but I could really use some tips, to get it to look like that?

so please help

Sorry for my bad english

Alberto Rdrgz

find out what materials you would need, gather some reference, and mimic them. I mean most of this stuff is just trial and error.

JonathanLambert

I find sitting in a dark room, cussing, and stabbing my monitor with my Wacom pen helps. Seriously though, slow down and really look at the surfaces and figure out why they look like they do. Is it shiney, dull, smooth, ruff?

Chimp

Ok so you need to start looking at existing texture maps and seeing what they do.

Most models these days will have a colour, normal and specular map- here are some basic uses of each:

Colour does exactly what it says on the tin, the colour. think of it as the paint on the canvas.

Normal maps are used to fake high poly detail on low poly models, so here you'd get the grains in the wood or the bumpy surface of the stucco wall.

Specular maps deal with with the shininess of a surface and how it catches the light. you could be doing a glass window and have some parts really shiny but other areas not at all reflective where there is glue from a poster that was taken off the window previously. or dusty areas on an old car.
These are also used to tell the engine what colour the shine is, so- you may have noticed metalic surfaces can have coloured specular highlights, like christmas tree baubles- this is the map you'd use for that effect.

Other common types of texture include:

Opacity - this deals with how opaque a surface is. Often used for ripped bits of cloth and stuff like that. Hair too.

Ambient Occlusion - this is usually baked into the colour map but it is generated from a high polygon mesh for the shadows in the crevices.

Detail maps - some engines use these or a variant of these, they're a tiling texture of a surface detail (like rough bumps) and they are blended into the other textures but only visible from within a certain distance of the object.

Get texturing and show us so we can critique

razzta91

Okay, thank you for your tips and tricks.

I will start on my reference hunt and then play with it in photoshop

razzta91

And what is the best solution.

is it to unwrap the building?
or just use uvw mapping?

Chimp

unwrap it, you'll want to for lightmap reasons anyway.