Computer Games Modelling : Army vehicle Texture

Week 8&9

After unwrapping the UV's for the Hagglund and baking the high poly for it, all there was left to do was texture it.

For textures I used my own reference images and hand painted textures. First, what I did was to bake an AO for my mesh, however I had to bake the tracks and body separately, because if I had baked them as a whole I would get a nasty black seam on my wheels and tracks if I was to animate them. So I duplicated my mesh and separated the tracks from the main body. After that I left only one of each wheel and deleted all the others, because I didn't need them for the bake.

On the image above you can see what I used to bake my tracks. I used only this set of wheels, because all the others were duplicates and I didn't need to bake all of them. After that in Photoshop I combined the AO for the body and the tracks in to one AO sheet. I had to fix some issues I had, but what I did was to hand paint them by using the Clone tool in Photoshop.

After my Ambient occlusion was finished, I started making my diffuse for the mash. As I said before I used self- gathered reference and some hand painted textures.

First, I applied a base metal texture to almost every part of the mesh. Then over the body and the roof- top I set a hand painted texture resembling green paint. After that I wanted to add some detail to it, so I painted some dirt, thinking of on which part of it it would have dirt. Using the Lasso tool in Photoshop I hand painted some spots over the roof top.

Second, thing I did was to pain some spots over the body using the same technique just to give it a more military look. I added some layer effects inner shadow and drop shadow to make it look more interesting. I also applied a layer mask over them and copied on the mask textures with cracks and rust, just so it could fade them and give them a more worn look.

Third, I did the inside using pretty mush the same textures. I only added a lather texture for the seats and steering wheel. Another thing I did was to rework the hinges, because my normal map for them didn't work out very good, I decided to hand paint them. Using my UV's as a guide, I hand painted where I wanted the bolts and after that using the layer effect Bevel and emboss, stroke I got a pretty good result.

Finally, after I did all the textures for the tank, I wasn't happy with the final result, because it looked to new and considering it is a military vehicle I wanted it to have a more worn out and used look, so I applied a layer mask over the green paint using a scratched metal texture and the result was that it showed the base metal texture beneath it which was the result I was looking for. After that I applied a hue/saturation and Levels over the whole texture sheet and this is the result I got.