Week 4 - Texture maps

Although our inspiration models will essentially be modeled and created within a 3D software, such as 3DS max, it is important to understand textures, how they are applied to models and what effect they have on the model itself.

When a model is left un-textured it takes away any life and emotion from it. Designers will spend roughly 40% on the model and 60% within a texturing software, such as Photoshop or Zbrush; this is why it is important to home your skills with texturing and understanding color pallets, what works and what doesn't.

The third session with our tutor was all about understanding and setting the foundations for the texturing side of 3D modeling and designing.
Websites such as 'Mayong.com' and 'CG textures' were used for us to collect a:
- Brick texture
- Nature texture
- Metal texture

The task set by the tutor was to collect these textures and create a 'tile map' from each one; this gave us a better understanding of how tiling textures work, it also helped with further familiarizing ourselves with Photoshop.

To begin 'tiling' the textures an offset had to be placed which sort of loops the image round revealing a 'seam' where the texture connects back to itself. In order to remove this seam we had to use the clone tool within Photoshop and manually remove it.
After the seam had be successfully removed we now had to shrink the canvas size down to '512 by 512 pixels'.

Blogged by Adam Place on 18th October 2013