Basement Tileable Texture

After getting a semi-final blockout for the old watermill I decided to start attacking the tileable textures in turn to start getting an idea of how everything looked together.  The largest unbroken piece of the watermill is the basement so I thought I should start there.

I liked the look of the thin shale/sandstone brick in this reference so I decided to go for something like that.

First I looked at the shape and feel of the stone structure and did a quick paint over to get a bit of a feel for the construction and scale of it.  After that I highlighted some of the items that break up the noise of the stone for future reference as I dig deeper into modeling later down the road.  Also because I need to do more paint overs because they're fun and I'm a horrible 2D artist  :)

First I built a tileable template in Maya, paying close attention to my resolution because I planned to sculpt in Zbrush for a normal map and then transfer map and build my diffuse and spec maps from that.

And then a tiling test

From there I imported into Zbrush and began sculpting...it was a lot more pieces than I thought  :)

After a couple tedious hours I opted to export what I had and duplicate some stones to save time and get on to transferring maps and setting up my color selection map for PhotoShop

Final compiled result after PhotoShop diffuse and spec creation

And current progress on the Watermill

My next step will be to start breaking up the upper portion of the house with trim and planning out my uv maps.  Hoorah!

The Old Watermill

This is a portfolio project I began about 2 weeks ago.  I plan to learn and improve my skills in zBrush, High to Low Poly modeling, Re-topping, hand painting textures, visual effect creation and timing, and engine implementation.  That's the plan anyway and so far so good.

Research:

I went with the watermill because its a simple building with animatable bits and pieces -- meaning particle effects, interesting silhouette, moving pieces, opportunities for environmental texture effects.  These are some research images:

From these I created a basic Maya blockout:

And then moved into a final blockout:

Seth's Blog

So I decided to begin a blog to informally document my workflow, improve my skill set and, hopefully, to inspire other artists as I myself have been inspired by so many.  That's all  :)