r a m y h a n n a . c o m - polygon texturing tutorial

By Ramy Hanna

Revelation Interactive LLC.

This is a comprehensive walkthrough of my learnings and techniques over the last two months working for Revelation Interactive on an XBOX titlet. I hope that the information here is helpful for any sort of texturing, whether it is for gaming, or high-end production. Most of this information is geared towards 3DS Max, but it can also be applied to Maya and other 3D packages.

I will begin by explaining my thought process in texturing a game level.

Before going ahead and starting to texture the model, it is always important to understand what the environment will look like.

	In this model, I was given the task of creating a club scene with a very futuristic, yet elegant look to the environment. With this in mind I thought of different elegant materials that would look futuristic with an art deco look. I began to think of different woods and stones; marble and mahogany in particular. I believe the most important aspect to texturing a model is not the technique, but the sources of textures. I have accumulated many high-res images of different stones, woods, clays, plants etc. In fact, the more images you have, the better your models will look.
For the model in the image above I was able to texture the entire level with a total of 20 different shaders. Each shader used an image map. This technique can become quite heavy on memory, and each shader adds up, so be sure to limit the size of your image maps. There are ways to limit the amount of shaders by, putting several images together on the same texture map. Then you can share the same shader with different objects. It is very important to label each texture and shader accordingly so they do not get mixed up.
	This image on the left is the same model as the image above. In fact it is just a screen capture from 3D Max's open GL, and isn't even a render. Here you can see the plants with the leaves, the different woods and carpets. The marble floors and furnishings that make the environment come to life.
	This is the Material Editor for 3DS Max. Selected is the shader on the top right. This is the shader for the interior of the elevators. It is using two texture maps. I decided to use walnut for the walls and a tan carpet for the floor. There are only two shaders for plants. An opacity map accompanies each texture map for the plants. This tells the renderer to hide certain areas, and gives quite impressive results.
The true work for creating these shaders is done in Photoshop. I use a combination of high-res photos I have taken and images found on the internet. Typically I combine the two, and then touch up on them to make them fit my model. I will go through the process of what I did to create Beowolfs jacket.
	The true work for creating these shaders is done in Photoshop. I use a combination of high-res photos I have taken and images found on the internet. Typically I combine the two, and then touch up on them to make them fit my model. I will go through the process of what I did to create Beowolfs jacket.
	After working with the UVW modifier, go ahead and do the Unwrap UVW modifier. This is an image of the jackets UV points in the UVW editor. You can tell that the cylindrical mapping was used by the way that the jacket is layed out. The cylindrical mapping for this model is probably the most time efficient method for working with the UV's. With the UV's in this layout, it is easy to work with the sleeves, and other parts of the jacket. From this state, I moved the UV's around to achieve a good painting map.
	This is what the UV's of the jacket look like after I played with them a bit. I moved each sleeve from the main body of the jacket by selecting the faces of the sleeves, and breaking the UV's along the seam of the sleeves and body. Then I gave each arm it's own space to work with. It is important for me to note that, I could have mirrored the UV's along the middle of the model to have higher detail, and less to work on. But if you know that you don't want your texture map to be symmetrical on both sides of your model, it is better to layout the entire model, which is what I chose to do for this jacket. After you layout your UV's, then you are going to want to get them into some sort of painting software, like Photoshop, or Deep paint. In Max, unfortunately there is no built in UV snapshot button. I found a plug-in for Max called Texporter, which allows you to take snapshots of your UV's at various resolutions, formats, and compressions. I have found this plug-in to be very useful. If you don't want to go digging around to download it, you can always hit your print screen key on the keyboard!
Now, for the fun part, and is what I believe to be perhaps the most important part for a good texture map….Photoshop. You can create your texture map in any painting package, but I have always found Photoshop to be the best one to use in terms of blending images and paintings on top of your UV's.
	Typically, this is how I set up my layers in Photoshop. I make a copy of my UV's layer and place it on the top. Then, I change it to screen mode. This allows me to work on lower layers and still see my UV's in place. In-between the two UV layers I create several new layers to work with. For this one, I created 3. It just depends on what you want to do.
	This is the basis of the texture map. The top part is the body, and the bottom parts are the two sleeves. If you look carefully, you can tell that I took parts from the image above and pasted them onto the texture map. After copying proper areas of the image above, I painted over it, and did some smudging to make it look right.
	Then I added different colors to the areas of the sleeves and body of the jacket to make it look better. Having these areas as different layers gives you a lot of flexibility and control to change their location, color, size etc.
	Then, the final touches. I added another layer for product placement. This time I added the company's logo to the back of the jacket, and the front of the right side of the jacket. Again, because it's just another layer, it makes it easy to add other product logos and designs. Because I didn't mirror the UV's, I am able to put a logo in the middle of the model without having any problems.
	After the texture is finished, just apply the image to a shader in Max, and apply it to the model. Max will show the texture in its open GL, even before it is rendered. You may have to do a texture correction, from the window options. But the final render will look fine.