My Finished Door

Here is my finished door!

Using Maya: Making Normal and Texture Maps

Creating Normal and Texture Maps.

With my finished UV's, I needed to desaturated them in order to create a normal map. The reason for this is when create a normal, it uses black and white as different ranges of depth, in order to make it appear more 3D. I saved the desaturated file as a 'Targa'.

 I then opened a clever piece of software called 'Crazy bump' which generates UVs into normal maps for you. On this occasion I used the create 'heightmap' tab to transfer my grey scale image into a normal map.

I selected my Targa file and uploaded the UV.

Once Crazy bump had generated the UV texture, it automatically loaded up my normal map and a 3D example of what it would look like within Maya.

As you can see the texture from my Photoshop work really comes out in this example. The wood grain looks good, but I think would look better if I tweaked some settings.

 I changed the intensity to full to really get a strong definition from all the textures.

 I then clicked 'save' and saved the normals to a file to reopen in Maya.

I went back to my door model and reassigned a Lambert material. I then selected the material attributes to place my Normals map to a bump map file. This would make my door have the properties of a 3D texture, with the use of shadows and highlights.

In the settings I selected bump mapping and selected to open 'file'

In this new window for bump mapping, I changed the 'use as' drop down menu from bump to 'Tangent Space normals'

From there I opened my Normal map file I created in Crazy bump.

Here is my door with my normal map applied!

Although my door has a Lambert set material, I wanted to change it on my two bell models. I decided to change it to a 'Blinn' because it makes the shapes appear shiny, which would be ideal for these metallic bells. I applied the material in the same way I did the Lambert by holding down the right mouse button and assigning it.

I then repeated the process I did on my door, but with the bells. I had to re-upload my normal map as I had already applied a new material.

Here is my bell with a Normal map and a Blinn material. Looks much better and shinier!

Now to add my textures! I selected the door and went back into the 'materials attributes tab'

However, this time instead of clicking 'bump mapping' I selected 'colour' instead. I opened the settings tab next to it to open up a textures menu. I clicked file and selected my coloured textures targa file that I did on Photoshop.

Here is my door with my normals and my texture applied!

I had to also reapply the texture file to my bells because of the separate 'Blinn' material. Once I added the texture/colour, it really made the bells appear shiny and bright.

Here is the final composition of my door! with both normal and texture maps applied!

Digital Modelling: Producing 'Textures' using Photoshop

Making textures for my Door in Photoshop

I began the process by taking a UV snap shot of my door in Maya.

I then uploaded the part of my door I wanted to add texture to within Photoshop.

I inverse selected the two circles and selected a 'cream' colour for the door base.

I applied the base coat.

I then selected a darker colour of cream for shadowing the detail.

As this door is going to look like it's made from wood, I use a wood grain brush with the darker colour and applied it to both circles.

I then selected the 'burn' tool to re-work into parts of the wood grain pattern, to give more depth to the door.

I then repeated this process, but this time using the 'dodge' tool. This adds highlights which also gives the illusion of 3D depth on the wood grain pattern.

I wanted to add panels to my door. To do this I used the pen tool to create straight lines for the panels.

I used rulers to make sure the panels would aligned nicely.

I began drawing out my panels with the pen tool.

Once I made one panel, I selected a dark brown and held down right click and selected 'fill'.

Here is my first panel!

I repeated this process across the door whilst paying special attention to the ruler guidelines.

I then wanted to add a darker brown to the panels for another wood grain pattern effect.

I inverse selected the panels I made on a separate layer.

Then I use the wood grain brush again over the panels. 

I repeated the process before, by using the 'burn' tool to add more depth to the wood grain pattern...

...and also used the 'dodge' tool for highlights.

Once the panels had been adjusted. I then wanted to create shadows behind the panels to make them appear 3D. To do this, I selected the base layer and re-used the burn tool underneath the panels. 

I also did this process with the dodge tool to also add to the 3D effect.

Once the door texture was complete, I merged the layers together and imported them back onto my UV snapshot. 

Using Maya: Fixing UV errors.

  When doing the UVs on my door, I noticed my Bells had a weird section where the pattern distorted.

 I opened up the UV texture editor and took a look at the mesh.

To fix this, I need to sew as many parts of the Bell as I could so that the texture pattern could wrap around it efficiently. I had to think of the different parts of the bell, so I knew what I need to sew. The area in which the error occurs is the outside edges from the top and bottom of the bell, so I needed to sew all them together.

To do this, I selected the UV tab and highlighted parts of the edging to the bell by clicking the vertexes. This particular piece needed to be rotated.

In the UV editor tool bar I selected the rotation tool to turn this section around to match the rest of the edging mesh.

I then sewed the loose edges together.

 To make sure everything fits together nicely, I adjusted the size of the two ends of the bell using the scale tool.  I then placed them inside the rim of the bell. This makes it easier tidier.

Here you can see where I have sewn all the edges to the bell. However, some of the inside edges were not straight.

 To do this, I selected the edges which were uneven and used a special tool in the UV texture editor that straightened them out. This tool used 4 different alignments, one for the top, bottom, left and right edges to straighten out. The image below shows four red arrows and 4 sets of yellow dotted lines. These are the tools are used.

There! a better UV map with a cleaner mesh!