Lighting experiments, ventilation and vertex floors.

In this update, I have added a new textures, tweaked the old and looking for new ways to make the scene better. Here's a screenshot:

Since quite a bit has happened, I'll list some updates that I felt needed to be done:

Firstly, I retextured/topologised the chinese lantern, adding a normal map to make the lantern look less as if it was made out of card and more like metal. I also tightened up the specular highlights and tweaked the alpha and shader of the bulb to make the normal map pop more. I'm considering also adding a light function to the light on the object.

I added in the sofa and chair textures, and used a detail map to make it look more like fabric. I've been using this extensively, as it gets past resolution issues stemming from directly texturing the diffuse in Photoshop.

I've also had a deal of fun texturing the ceiling ventilation pipe.  First, I started by baking the highpolys in Max(much better for hard surface), and then I ensured that the specular and gloss were quite high for the reflectivity of the material to be spot-on. I made four pieces, the pipe, the end grille, a bend and the ceiling clip on  a 1024/1024 sheet.

In the level, I used a cubemap and a subtle fresnel highlight to simulate the reflective material, also using a mask to place the cubemap only on the section I wanted.. The result is pictured, and works rather well.

I also wanted to change up a floor a little, as it was just textured BSP in the end and my fascination with the potential of vertex blending wasn't going away. The process was slightly different compared to the walls, but I had some fun doing it.

I began by mapping the texture to a plane roughly the same resolution as the texture on the level's floor, using the existing wallpaper mesh as reference for its size in UU. 

To make the floor more interesting, I made some tile sets of wear and missing floorboards that snap together on the grid, then welded and lightmapped them. This would make the floor's silhouette different whilst still being consistent with the texture, providing enough verts for blending.

For the texture, I added some faint highlights to the floorboards and made a lighter and more stained texture to simulate a more worn floor. It's very subtle but a definite improvement, and I will add more variation in the future.

My contact advised me to try the scene in different lighting, and I find that this is actually a neat idea, as it allows me to judge textures better than in a dark scene. Here's a shot of a quick morning light setup below.

My next move in the project is to make a bona-fide highpoly hero asset. The one I had initially planned to do was the addition of a police helicopter outside, similar to this:

This chopper would fly outside the scene and shine its searchlight in the window as a dynamic light.

Thanks for reading :)