XB2178 - Extra's Modeled and Textured

After animating my commander to be pointing on a map that doesn't exist that's sitting off the ground, and for this I then created some military crates stacked up and then the map on top and maybe some other documents.

So firstly I created the 3D models keeping in mind how low poly I wanted them to be, they crates themselves are just made up from different boxes as opposed to insetting a face and extruding from it.

As you can see below I have just used several boxes in the unwrap spaced out to maintain a low polycount and I'll just use ambient occlusion to show me where is visible and be able to avoid wasting time texturing something that isn't seen.

The diffuse map was then created using the same procedure as everything else has been made with base colours and using the same browns from the tank and the crew for the base colour before adding tones and detailed black lines where the wood panels end. Additionally I used a wooden texture over everything which also acted as a guide as to where the panels intersected with each other and also where I should have highlights. lastly I then printed stenciled words and letters over the top to make it look more militaristic.

The specular map was created in the same process as before with the diffuse map desaturated and the levels modified. It generally was quite dark with the exception of the text as wood isn't quite shiny now is it.

I then again used nDO2 to create the normal map to hint that there are indents in between the wood panels to create interesting shading and shadows.

Next to pump out was the map, I did have to refer back to the animations a bit as I did want the commander to be pointing along something that viewers could actually see so it didn't just seem random. The map was very quick and basic as I didn't want to create something too detailed as again it's very small and not the main focus of the diorama so both the diffuse and the normal map are on 512 x 512 texture sheets, then again in hindsight I can't help but feel that they could've even been smaller but oh well. Again the diffuse was created with a base colour, some tones in another layer (not that you can tell), a noise layer just to make it more interesting and a paper texture over the top.

The normal map was just created using the paper texture as the paper would be flat anyway and wouldn't have bumps along the where the trees or the mountains and I did want the normal to be mainly plain.

And lastly below are the crates and map rendered together. i am very happy with how they came out and as they aren't too much of a main focus in the diorama they aren't the main attention and so I was happy that they weren't very eye catching as they're not supposed to be.