Procedural Textures

Results on Thursday. Not too fussed I think. I know I've done a good job and I'm just eager to get on with some things that have had to sit and wait while I was preparing for hand ins.

Had a big production meeting at the end of last week to sort out who's doing what for Divided and Papa over the summer so I'm kind of set for what I need to achieve in the next few months.

I ended up choosing texturing and story-boarding as my specialist areas. I've an idea what I want to do for the story-boarding stuff but it might end up not being feasible as there's not going to be any opportunity to do it on films next year, it would all have to be an extra personal project.

For texturing I've got the cool problem of sorting out how to do a forest for Papa without destroying the render time. With Divided I'm trying out different ways of getting lots of metal surfaces done fast.

To that end I've been heavy looking into procedural textures. It's taking a while to get used to. There's so many bloody nodes in Maya that are not self explanatory in the slightest. I'm basically going through them one at a time trying to figure out what each can do. Bit of a nightmare.

I've had some decent results for the tree bark textures though...

Not to bad eh? I'm also pretty confident I can tweak the shader slightly and get different types of bark and or moss etc... 

Metal surfaces are proving more difficult. I could do them no bother by UVing and using texture maps but I'm pretty convinced it'll be possible to get good results using procedurals. The main issue I'm having is getting the scratches for a brushed metal surface right.

Here's a few renders of where I am at the moment...

Not great. If I can fix the scratches I think it will help a lot. Over all the shader needs lots of tweaking anyway. I still have a few things I want to try. Gonna take a breather from it and come back to it in a few days. I'll hit the library in that time and see if i can find any books covering the problem.