Behind The Door- Week 3

Week 3 - Textures & Unwrapping

Last week I prepped the Entrance Terminal for baking and texturing. This week I finally get to texture the terminal. At this moment I found out that I was missing some details that I didn't model in my high poly, but their's no reason to worry since I can create what I need in Substance Painter. Also something I kept in mind was the fact that the texture size is a 1024, which doesn't allow for fine details, but also smooths out any blemishes.

The buttons of the phones keypad was something I forgot to make in the high-poly. If I had a higher resolution texture sheet I would have gone back and created the buttons in the high-poly, this way I would get a clean and controlled result. I find that creating buttons in substance has too soft of an edge/bevel, although using a levels on the black mask could allow for more control on the bevel.

The frost that I created is made up of two different layers. The first uses is a more unique painting of general frost, I used a fill onto the black mask, using the ambient occlusion to spread a light colour into the crevices of the terminal. Then I used two different grunge maps to remove and add variation to the ambient occlusion. I would then use paint layers on top to add a more unique touch to the texture. 

The second is for large frost/snowflakes. It's created from a folder with two fill layers inside that have large shapes. Using a black mask on the folder allows me to control the placement and opacity of the snowflakes.    

Below is a resistor that is part of the electrics in the terminal. As an added detail, I wanted to have some wires forcefully pulled out of place to show desperation. I only wanted to texture this small model since it has generic features and would be duplicated a few times. 

I worked on the keys in the keyboard in a separate substance file my reasoning is that the keys would be floating and obscuring parts of the Terminal, it would also be easier navigating the scene if the keys are separate. 

My environment is mostly comprised of concrete and metal and snow. Since the concrete material will be applied to large structures and the texel density is 1024 per square meter, this concrete will tile a lot. So my goal was to create a texture that is read as concrete, but not too noisy that its noticeably tiling. Since I could add any grime or wear with decals. 

The next material i created was rust. Although looking back, this material is fairly unnecessary as I mostly blended between a clean metal and the metal with some of the rust being revealed, which is below this picture. 

This is a rusty metal, later on I toned down the noise of both the albedo and roughness in the metal. I also removed the height information of the flaking around the rust, since that would only appear on painted metal and this is not a painted metal.

Something that I experimented with was creating deformation on the door. I wasn't exactly sure as how I should approach this, so I did this early on in the week to get a proof of concept. 

What I wasn't sure about was whether to do a high to low bake, or a POM Decal. With the high to low, I could section off one area of the model with a second UV channel to be baked and textured. The only problem with that is making sure that the unique and tiling textures line up and also having a consistent texel density, I'm also not sure if this would work either. 

The other method that I'm more confident with is the POM decal. I've used this in the previous project, and it should work. The only downside to this is that if I want to deform the shape of the door, I would have to manually do this to the low poly. This is also a fairly efficient workflow, as it doesn't require a second UV channel.

Before I spend a long time sculpting a masterpiece, I wanted to see if my theory would be correct first. So I created a quick texture in substance designer and used that as a sort of place holder.

Looking at the result of this I can definitely say that this should be how I should approach creating the deformation on the door. Although it is slighty more engine expensive due to being a decal and a POM. Its efficient and works.