Small Things

Everything in the scene now has a texture! Technically.

I still need to make one for the edges of the ground, and I've been having some trouble with layering two textures onto the same mesh. You see, I want dirt under the pond because it will break up the grass texture so it doesn't look like it's the same texture repeating infinitely (which is what's happening). When I add them both together all sorts of bad things happen and the ground mesh basically breaks and doesn't render properly. This might just be a glitch in Maya (the 3D program I'm using) and when I export it to a game engine it might work. If it doesn't I have a few more options so fret not.

But all that's for later. Now we see the last of the models that were textured:

The lantern is a simple model and it came out pretty much how I wanted. I was a little restricted in fitting all of the texture into one image and had to recycle some of the pixels. This is pretty common, but I don't like the vertical lines on the circular base for the candle. But it's a small object so it doesn't matter.

I was putting the rocks off because I knew it would take ages and ages to put detail onto each one, but I ended up combining them all into one mesh and making one texture for it. This made it far more simple and easy because I had the rocky detail recurring over the texture and all I had to do was paint the white lines. Finding quick and effective solutions to problems is one of the reasons 3D is so fun for me. :)

And here we have the grass texture. I went through a few iterations, each one less detailed than the last. The problem with grass is that because it has a lot of small detail it is very easy for it to look realistic from a distance. Considering the style of the scene, I chose to go with a very simplified texture (though not 100% simple). If I zoom in all the way and you look closely you can see a very faint grassy texture that's set to about 3% opacity. It might seem too simple, but once there's a lot of grass and bushes it will (hopefully) blend in rather nicely.

And I'll leave you with a nice shot of the front of the house. If I was lazy I'd call this complete and go play some games, but I want to push this as far as I can and really make it something special. I hope I have it in me.

See you next Sunday (which reminds me, we're back on schedule)!