Blockout, texturing and the magic of floorboards

In this latest update I have been working on adding more blockouts and have also produced my first texture for the piece, which I will outline below.

This is the apartment blockout as of today. I've worked my way around the bigger meshes and now concentrating on blocking out the smaller ones. The workflow I use is to unwrap and lightmap each mesh before I import it into UDK; this way, I can save time later and get a clearer idea on how the scene's lighting is progressing using the Lighting Only viewport in UDK.

Floorboards Breakdown

The texture I created today was for the room's floorboards using Photoshop, photosourcing and nDo. I began by finding a good reference image:

And then, I began to create it in Photoshop. My workflow was as follows:

• Import photosource image. I used two for the wooden planks themselves, and one for the nails.
• Isolate wooden planks, and then use the Clone Stamp tool to lengthen the planks to the width of the texture and them repair the seams. Also used Clone Stamp to remove artifacts that cause repetition, such as the dark fibers below.

• Repeat process for other planks.
• Once the full planks are created, I can then move them left and right without resizing them, meaning that I can create breaks in the planks that will still tile correctly by duplicating planks.

• Using a photograph of a nail, I can then set this to Hard Light and overlay the breaks in the planks
• Desaturate the planks and reduce contrast/brightness to match the photo reference better.

Once I had completed the texture, I initially created the normal map by adjusting the contrast on the diffuse to remove extra grain detail and then using nDo to generate a strong map: However, when I previewed my texture in Marmoset I learned that the normal map was off, making the woodgrain seem very rough.

The reference image I used showed that new floorboards were often varnished with creosote, taking out the roughness of the original grain. I made a new normal map using only the base forms of the wood planks, with a slight hint of the wood grain: I did this by setting the second normal map to Overlay and reducing opacity to an acceptable level. 

The wood also felt too clean and bright, so I added a bit of dirt and staining and darkened/sharpened the image in Photoshop.

And Voila! A much happier and more realistic texture.

This has been a lengthy update, so I'll leave it at that. I have the feeling that I am going to need to expand this concept, so I'm currently devising plans for another room from the adjoining corridor to be modelled.

Bye for now :)