FMP Week 15 - The texturing continues.

   With the surprise of guest lecturers Ben Keeling and Rich Carey last week, and their very helpful critique on my work, I have been plodding on with the continuation of texturing, working my way through the many assets I have created, and sorting out the issues they brought up.

   Mike Pickton has started a series of talks on subject we all feel we should know or may want to know about. This week his lecture was on macro variation in textures and creating a water textures, along with other tips and tricks he feels we should know. Definitely full of useful and simple info to push our FMP's.

   Macro variation in textures within engine is a great way to break up large tiling textures. I've had this problem in the past, where I've got a tiling texture that's not that noticeably tiled, until it spans a large area. With macro variation you're simply multiplying or blending two textures together at different sizes giving your texture a varying roughness and gradient. It works surprisingly well with a simple grime/clouds black and white texture. And better still, it takes about 2 mins to set up. I definitely plan to add this to a large range, if not all of my tiling engine textures.

Macro variation.

Sometimes this way of using macro variation doesn't work, and can overwhelm your textures. To combat this you can multiply your texture with the macro variation to blend them together. So that when it blends with your actual diffuse, its been dilated and can give sutler results. Like this.

Macro variation with multiply.

   We were also shown how to create a more grounded water material. Something I struggled with greatly on one of my previous style matrix projects. I was stuck between the option of having it look like paint or completely transparent. But with this new method you can have a good balance of both, along with a varying transparency depending on what angle you're looking at the water surface and a good sense of depth when looking down. I may just have to go back and alter my hot springs for portfolio purposes. Mikes talk.
   But before I go back to previous projects, the FMP progress continues. I did a fair bit of cloth texturing this week, on the canopies, banners and market stall texture sheet, along with the underpass cloth that's hanging down. I feel I've got a good workflow for creating the fabric now, so the rest should come pretty easily.

   I was also shown this week how to set a parameter on a mesh so you can change the colour of it. I'll have to set up a different material for each variation which may hinder the performance depending on how many I have so I will have to work sparingly, I think 3 variations will do. Although I'm sure Mike Pickton showed a few of us a way to add this parameter to a set mesh, and vary it on the instance itself rather than having multiple materials. I'll ask him, as this is the preferred method.

Canopy colour variation 1

Canopy colour variation 2

   The problem I'm facing with using the duplicated material is that its changing the colour of everything on the texture sheet, including the brackets. So its hard to find a balance of making them looks different on the cloth but not to different on the frame. This is another reason why I think using Mike's method would be more beneficial too. He should be able to show me a simple way to mask out the frame.

The engines coming along, but I still have a fair amount of white in the level. A series of tilables should be able to combat this pretty quickly.

Up to date engine view. Too much white!!!!!