Thanks to last semester's project, where I modelled the Bathysphere and all it's interior components, I feel quite confident in the process of UV mapping.
I already knew in my head what sort of textures and colours I wanted the house to have. I had imagined from fairly early on with the concept drawings that I was going for a tudor cottage style. Obviously I wanted it to look a bit grubby and worn, seeing as the building is in a forest and has had to contend with the elements.
I've used the alpha channels when creating the textures for my windows as I want the possibility of light being able to pass through them, and also so that they feel like they are actually glass. Even though I'm not going for a hyper-realistic look, I still wanted to give the windows some detail such as with the diamond framework. Looking at images of country cottages, I noticed one of their appealing features is the many styles of windows. During the modelling, I also made sure the window frames were slightly warped, and not too straight to give the building a more aged feel, as well as the kind of crooked style that is associated with witches and horror.
I merged a thatched roof texture with my paint strokes in Photoshop to create the roof textures. On the 'underside' I included some wiring as an extra detail.
I created two log textures for the log pile, and simply twisted and moved the UV maps of each log to make the pattern on each one have a slightly different placement so they're not too obviously duplicated.
The chest texture has a combination of Gothic patterns with leather texture and paint strokes to give it the sort of ornate look I was thinking of. For the claws, I used a metallic shader, which I found was effective enough without the need to map them. I did attempt the mapping, but found it was a little complicated and so the shader seems to do the job just as well.
For the fence panels, all I've had to do is create a map for one panel and then used the 'transfer attributes' action to apply the same map to every panel. This worked just fine as every panel has the same number of faces and there are only minor differences in the vertices so that when it comes to applying the texture, any warping should not be visible.
Creating the mushroom textures was pretty fun, I used some different types of brushes to paint them. I decided on purple as it's sort of a common colour throughout the scene, or so that's what I found with the concept artwork.
I made this lantern in about half an hour, I feel I'm getting much better at speedy modelling. I can decide on which basic polygon shapes to begin with and how to mould them into an everyday object. I've also noticed in many current video games that not all textures are highly detailed. It is often dependant on how much interaction with the object the player is expected to have, or how important that object is in the story.
