Alien Head

The final task for this module was to poly paint an alien head using ZBrush, then bake it to a low poly version of the head.
Here are the diffuse and normal textures for the alien head.

Here is the alien head with textures applied, in Maya.

Cottage

The first of the two main final tasks was to texture a cottage. The cottage was given to us already modelled and UV mapped. It also included high poly sections which I used to bake some normal maps for the final low poly version.
One of the biggest challenges with texturing the cottage was the roof. The roof required 6 different variations of a tiling roof tile texture for different areas of the roof.
Here are all the different variations of the roof tile texture.

Here are the other textures I created for my cottage.

To add a little more interest to my cottage I also created two glow maps. These allow the windows to look as if they have light shining through them.

Here are the normal maps I baked from the high poly models.

And here are the specular maps.

Photo Manipulation

For this task we had to do some basic photo manipulation. The idea was to take one photo of a landscape and change the sky behind it to that of a different photograph. To make the new photo seem more realistic I then also altered the brightness, contrast and slightly altered the hue of the landscape.

Here are the two original photographs and the photo I created.

Tiling Marble

This was my first real look at creating a texture that would be able to seamlessly tile across a surface. As it turned out this was a fairly simple process, requiring an offset, the clone brush and one or two other simple tweaks.

Below is the first tiling texture I created, a marble texture, repeated 4 times to show it tiling.

The second set of tiling textures I created was for a metal floor.

High Poly Baking

For this task there were two main objectives. One was to create a diffuse texture for the create, the other was to bake a high poly model down in to a normal map, to then be displayed on a low poly model. To create the normal map we baked the the high poly box down onto the low poly box using a program called xNormal. xNormal proved to be pretty tricky to use but in time I feel it'll turn out to be a massively useful tool.

Here are the normal and diffuse texture maps.

 And here is a comparison between the low poly crate with and without the normal map displayed. As you can see the difference is huge.

Old Book

This task was the first real taste of creating a texture by manipulating actual photographs. The task was to model and the texture an old book. The model had to be under 300 tris, the idea being that the book would be most likely to appear in a mobile game. The design of both the book and the texture were left to the imagination of each individual. For my book, I chose to go for a worn black leather book with a rusty golden binding, gilded page edges and embossed golden text. Overall I am extremely pleased with how the book texture turned out. I feel it looks very good, especially since it was my first proper attempt at creating a texture from photographic reference. I am most pleased with the wear around the very edge of the book.

Here is the diffuse texture for the book.

Here are a few shots of the book in Maya.

Custom Brushes

The second task we were given was to create a custom brush within Photoshop and then use it to create a simple image. The brush we were going to create had to be a cloud brush.

To create the brush is used a large amount of simple brush dots in various sizes, shades and with varying edge softnesses. I then used the chalk brush around the edges in order to break up the outline of the cloud shape in order to make it look slightly softer. I also used a little bit of the smudge tool as this was an extremely effective way of adding a little bit of a swirl to it.

Below are the custom brush I made and the simple sky image that I created using the brush.

Crate

The first task we were given in Game Texture Development was to model and texture a basic, cartoon style crate. This involved making a simple crate side panel which was then duplicated around to make an entire crate. The idea behind the texture was that it look hand painted to give it a simple, cartoon appearance. Because of this, I didn't use any actual photographic texture reference.

Here are the two variants of the texture, one with text and one without.

Here are three of the crates with the textures on them, displayed in Maya.