Early texture tests...

Today we had contextual studies throughout the day leaving minimal time to work on our beloved project which was a shame. Although myself and Alec were determined to test out some textures on our models so far. I know it's jumping the gun a bit considering the modelling isn't completed and texturing is not scheduled for a weeks time - however there is reason. It is difficult to stare at my plain Lambert model and judge my Gorilla design on terms of how play-do like it is. Secondly alterations in the design can be made if it is not looking like it could be made from clay i.e believabilty and realism. Some of my gorillas design aspects were far too jagged to be modelled from clay, even a texture wouldn't prevent it from looking impossibly hard edged. Thirdly we were both quite bored of modelling and it made a change!

Texturing is a weak spot for me admitidly, I have basic knowledge in UV mapping, creating textures and bumping but it doesn't go much further. In order to achieve a play-do/clay texture I learned it would involve a layered texture approach involving alpha channels and playing around wih the input and output nodes - allof which i'd never touched.
Alec created a simple finger print texture with a few hairs and smudges in photoshop and applied it as a bump to the model, however we both agreed the geometry was far to flat and smooth still and so I suggested a second wavy bump to give the effect of moulded dents etc. We played around with a few default maya textures and found that the brownian one when enlarged worked perfect to give this moulded look. I then struggled to understand how we would achieve placing our other finger print bumps on top of a bump! Mr Grigsby helped for a long time and explained layered textures to my aswell as transparency, alphas and how to navigate around the blinns node attributes. He also gave our scene an awesome daylight light using mental ray settings in about 2 seconds flat! Anyway we managed to get there in the end by making the finger print bumps very soft and faint, and the browsian as vivd as possible, then sliding the alpha down so the two overlayed nicely together. Alec changed the scale and UV repeat options to achieve a really nice random look. We increased the number of finger prints on our jpeg and used Alecs genius tiling method so no image edges appeared when repeated. Oh and got rid of the hair marks, they looked pants.

I am really happy with this as a first test, and both of us agree it is almost the finished artical in terms of the tecture we're after! I will post intructions on how to create it up here soon as I need to remind myself of the steps, aswell as our 2 bump jpegs. Below is a test render of the texture on the model so far...