My adventures into the wonderful world of texturing 3d models

So one of my day-lives is as a full time student studying 3d art and animation, with a specific focus on making pretty things for video games. We’re up to our third assignment, character modelling, but have some renders of things I did for environment design:

Intercom wall tile. This is a render of a small part of the the tile, mostly extruded from a plane
Intercom wall tile. This is a render of a small part of the the tile, mostly extruded from a plane

I’ve decided I quite like modelling so far, and I really really like texturing.  This one was a team assignment, and we all had a few different bits assigned to us. My complex object wasn’t so bad, so I set myself two additional challenges: minimal polygons and refined textures. My general rule of texturing is make something I wouldn’t be embarrassed to see in a game I was playing. Especially if the game was very boring and I suddenly had a lot of time to examine textures and snark.

The extrude tool is one of my favourite friends. I built the pipes mainly through basic cylinders, extruding, rotating the extrusion until it was on the right angle, and then tweaking the vertices a lot. The pipes still look a little bit angular, but they’re not so bad if you don’t look too closely. I think. This part was easy.

I really enjoy texturing, so I also handpainted all the textures myself (rust, etc), instead of resorting to photo manipulation etc.

The top of the tank was a little more tricky – I wanted to do a circular hole-y grate, but I also wanted to see if I could save polys and do it entirely by bumpmapping.

My first attempt...not so good.
My first attempt...not so good.

My first attempt…looks better now that I haven’t been working on it solid for a few hours, but was not so good. When I looked at it in UDK I realised one of the problems was that while I had tried to make the grate itself pop out, I hadn’t really done anything about the gunk underneath: it was a flat layer that didn’t do anything.

So I started painting in shadows and detail.

Much better.
Much better.

I fixed up the textures, added more shadowing (Although I probably could have done it a little more discretely), and grunged up the grate in general.

I think it looks a bit better now, or at least there’s a better sense of depth. 🙂 I think. But I would love to hear what you think!

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