Week 13

This week lecture was very similar to last weeks one except focusing more now on the side of texturing looking at the difference between normal maps and albedo maps and then looking at some programs we will be using in the future. He focused heavily on albedo mapping this is the texturing map that would have been used in a game like World of Warcraft  where you basically paint all the information in that you will need i.e. the lights and darks of an object. Normal maps however work differently they rely on computer generated lighting to light an object and so the texture map would look rather bland with basic colours and no real information. This week he told us we would be texturing a barrel in the style of a World of Warcraft, Dota 2 and League of legends.
        So that following day that's what we did being the first session of the week that Chris see's we spent a good amount of time building the barrel and unwrapping it where as the other groups would be handed this. After unwrapping the object he showed us a new tool called a UV snapshot which basically takes a screenshot of your UV layout and puts it into a JPEG format that you can then re-open in Photoshop to begin texturing. Unfortunately for this session for some reason my tablets pen pressure wasn't working and so my textures don't look particularly good due to this but it was more about what I had learnt during the lesson that really excited me.
        At the end of this workshop we were given a task to do over the Christmas break which was to create our own barrel and texture it accordingly. When I returned home having learnt my new skills and wanting to put them to use I decided that I wanted to do a "in-game cart" next to my barrel to make more a scene than just a barrel by itself. So I spent the rest of the day looking at references from games like the ones I talked about earlier and building a simple yet effective mesh. I then spent the next day unwrapping this slightly more complicated mesh which was hard to do and really pushed me at times and in the end not everything was unwrapped correctly but it was a great learning experience but everything was unwrapped correctly eventually with probably at least ten iterations where I refined my unwrapping skills. I then got the meshes UV snapshot into Photoshop and began laying down the ground work for the design focusing hard on my Photoshop file arrangement like Chris insisted us to do during the lesson and to work non destructively with masks. By the end of the week my cart had some basic colours and had been unwrapped successfully.
        On that Friday I had my first texturing session with Kayleigh, finally a session that focuses in detail on 2D art in Photoshop something a lot of us  have wanted for a while. I learnt things in this lesson that I didn't know how to do before I'd heard a lot of talk of custom brush presets but I though it was something you downloaded from the internet but she showed us how to make them ourselves. She also brought back my interest in the basic Photoshop brush with all the adjustments you can make using the F5 tab. I worked on a piece of fan art I guess of Bioshock that I have been working on at home in my free time what she showed us helped with the dirt and grime on the dress.
        This week has been productive and has been more of a learning curve than previous weeks unfortunately I wont be posting anything next week as I'm working everyday that week.