Creating & Applying Texture Maps

The final stage before animation was to apply texture, specular and bump maps to the objects. As a group we decided that a lot of the texturing will be done by all group members as this alleviated the work load and allowed us to focus on the animation and post production.

In preparation for the texturing phase, Tom and I downloaded a large collection of different textures that could be used for our project. I also created a brushed metal effect texture and manipulated another texture to my own requirements for use on the models I created. These were saved within the group work folders we share so other members of the group could use the same textures if needed.

As a lot of the steam pumps components featured a brushed metal effect so I thought it would be ideal to create one from scratch because its simple to create and I can make it as high a resolution as needed. I started with an image resolution of 1200 by 800 and filled the background grey. I applied a noise filter (14% gaussian, monochromatic), followed by a motion blur filter (angle 0, distance 41 pixels).

This is the final texture image used for the objects within 3ds Max.

Within 3ds Max I opened my model of a metallic cap and applied the brushed metal texture to each object via the diffuse map properties. Inside the diffuse map settings, under co ordinates I increased the U and V tiling to 3.0 each. .I dragged the diffuse map image down to the bump map properties to copy the image into the bump map settings. I then lowered the amount of bump down to 81.

I added specular highlights to the material inside the 'Blinn' parameter. Under the blinn properties I raised the specular level and glossiness to 74 and 27.

I found a texture online of a grainy, dirtied metal that suited the sort of material I needed for some of the steam pumps components. However upon applying the texture to the wheel object I found that the texture appeared more wooden than metal, even with specular mapping applied and tweaked. I imported the image into Photoshop and applied a few changes to make it appear more metallic. The image below is the standard texture, and the second image is the modified texture.

To start with I made the colour in the image much bolder by changing the hue and saturation with image adjustments properties.

I wanted to remove the black spots from the image as these were appearing more like dark spots on wood rather than a dirtied metallic effect. I used the patch tool within Photoshop to select the areas I wanted to remove and replaced them with the clearer sections of the image.

Finally I applied a motion blur texture like the brushed metal effect image. This gave me a much better image to work with.

I opened the wheel model within 3ds Max and applied the texture to the diffuse and specular level map properties for all the objects in the scene apart from the outer rim which will be a steel texture. I decreased the specular level map amount to 85.
Under the basic shader properties I changed the 'Blinn' parameter to 'Anisotropic' which gave the wheel model texture a much more realistic metallic texture. I tweaked the anisotropic parameters by changing the specular colour to a light pink instead of bright white, specular highlights to 166, glossiness to 30 and the anisotropic to 65. Orientation was left at 0 as there was no need to change this after experimenting with different settings.

For the outer rim of the wheel I applied a steel texture to the diffuse map. I changed the diffuse map U and V tiling parameters to 2.5 by 1.3 because the objects surface is quite thin. Within the blinn shader parameters I set the specular level to 149 and the glossiness to 10.

The red metallic texture was also used on another main component. I modeled a mechanism which is used in the centre of the steam pump and is made of the same metallic material as most of the other parts, such as the wheel.

I imported four separate materials into the library, the red metallic texture, the brushed metal texture, a concrete texture and a dirtied metal texture, each with their bump map amounts set to around 80. Each material also had their basic shader parameters changed from blinn to anisotropic.

The individual settings were all slightly different, specular levels ranging from 79 to 111, glossiness 19 to 65, anisotropic 57 to 72 and orientation ranging from 10 to 116.
Below is a rendered sequence of three images from applying the material to bump then specular mapping.

Using reference photos for guidance I was able to accurately copy the types of textures on the object. Also as some objects had different types of materials on the same object I had to use the polygon sub selection tool to select individual polygons I wanted to apply a texture to.