Tuesday 22 May 2012

Unit 6: Commission - Textures and UVs "Inside Facebook"

Hello Everyone,

Sorry I have been MIA, been playing about with my final animation and ultimately decided to get things finalised. Texturing is and always will be my weakest point when it comes to 3D modelling, the textures usually always either come out too big or too small and even then chances are that they have stretched in a certain way. Enough though I did not come here to moan, I just came on to post the few textures I actually did use.

There are 2 days to go and I have been keeping a cautious eye on the blog's plenty of nice visuals going on I have to say, its making me doubt mine a little. Regardless I tried my best and I still have quite a few bits of after effects to put into play here.

Anyway lets get onto my Textures and UVs for my "Inside Facebook" CG Sequence.


The images above (1 & 2) are the UV maps for my DNA strand and revolving background. The map was actually quite simple to make as it was just a hollowed out cylinder of course I had to remap the polygons to the front. I didn't want to get lost in trying to build complex shapes with complex UV maps shaders were my end focus and they worked out pretty well. Regardless the DNA strands and the looping backgrounds were comprised of my texture work and were nice and simple.


Images 3 & 4 were last minute creations. The telomere tips on my DNA strand were not lighting up when I zoomed in on them so I had to give them a spec map to get the glow effect that I needed. 3 was a revolving DNA wall which I am using to convey a world that is very much alive. The UV mapping was not working for a few of these so lots of minor alterations were made to the model including a couple of complete remaps.


I began with the 3 maps above which were not created as traditional UV maps. I made the textures and then fit them to the geometry retroactively in the scene. I knew they were only spiralling around a pipe so I could get away with a cheap move or two. The image to the left is the texture I was using originally but I ultimately did not use this texture as the spec and the bump were all that was required to get a decent scene. My initial bump is in the middle but when I added text this version was scrapped. The image to the right is my spec map and when I altered this the same changes went to the bump map.



My revised bump (shown above) was the final creation for the tunnel concept which ultimately was used for my final animation. Kudos if you are in the list I just grabbed a bunch of recent posts from facebook etc to create this backdrop. You will see the same thing used throughout most of my texturing. I wanted to keep everything at home but deep down to where we cannot possibly imagine.


The image above was a test image that I built when I was starting on my gene texturing, I laid the texture on the map when no surprises to me it stretched it and pixellated it far worse then I could have ever imagined possible. This was when I accepted the reality that any form of true grit was not possible in the time frame I had remaining. So I stepped back...


...And considered more basic textures, colour hues, with spec and bump values. This turned out to be more favourable as the textures did not look like complete crap. The tips were irrelevant to me at this point the ones on the strands of DNA would never be seen as they were physically inside the DNA strands sides. The specular map ended up becoming more important then the bump as the bump only made my DNA look old and broken so I decided to save it for a scene when a DNA strand would die.


The specular map kept becoming my highlight, more important then texture colouring as my scene mostly revolves on glows and high brights. Any on scene texture is kind of lost in the thick of it without a spec or some kind of incandescence. It just became more favourable and time sensible to be considering shaders more then maps without the uphill battle of mapping.



One of my final scenes gave me a little more of a run for my money when a required close up showed some very annoying UV template which I hadn't removed. This gave birth to the map above which I made specifically for this scene. You may notice that there are no textures for this, because as I said at this point spec maps were all I needed to continue my flow.

If I had more time I would be considering a few other things regarding mapping and getting everything much more tighter but at this point I'm a little drained and my lack of sleep is beginning to cost me lots of friends (facebook get it? LOL) I mean sanity.

Right I am off to get a few other bits done, might be posting up an another little update in a bit regarding my texture woes and various methods of lighting.

I hope everyone else is having a scream of a time...

Over & Out,
xXStItChXx

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