8. MORE BUILDINGS

After modeling the building, the next challenge was to texture it. Again, I could use the resources at Textures.com to find the materials that I felt would contribute to the visual sensibility that I was chasing.

All that said, I didn't really know what visual sensibility I was going for; instead this "sensibility" developed as I developed the details of this scene, and then the rest of the visual assets for "The Music of Erich Zann." I am sure that a professional would probably be able to show a color pallets, and other pre-visualization illustrations that she was going for. However, I don't have the talent of traditional illustration, so I avoided steps like this. Instead, I simply collected reference images from Internet searches, and utilized those as rough guides as to what I was going for.

So how did I decide to texture buildings, then? Well, I figured that I would decide on materials for the buildings, like stucco, or brick, or other features, and then take it from there. Then I would look for a nice tiled brick, wood, or stucco texture that fit the image in my head. If it was necessary, then I would alter the colors of those textures.

The next step was getting a bump map together for these textures. Sometimes, for textures like stucco types, I would merely take the original texture and simple desaturate it. That would give me a nice "poor man's" bump map that worked well enough, I felt.

However, for brick textures, I would have to actually go in there, and paint my own bump map. This was a much more tedious process. This usually entailed tracing out each individual brick in the image, and then making them darker (or lighter, I forget which) in their own image layer; then I would inverse select those bricks, and thus we get the deeper grout on a lighter layer.

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