Week 5: Environment Texture Adjustments.

Introduction:

In this week’s blog post, I’ll be talking you through how I went about texturing my elevator, discussing the reasons why I took a different approach in this instance. Afterward, I’ll be speaking about the process I went through when importing and exporting my objects into Substance Painter, displaying the additional designs I included onto my objects. Next, I’ll be going through the adjustments I made to the textures I created last week, touching upon the reasons why I made these tweaks. Lastly, I’ll be listing down the personal objects I’ve set myself to complete by next week.

This Week’s Task:

Texturing Elevator:

I began this week by finishing the textures for the remaining environment, which I didn’t have time to finish off last week. However, as mentioned in my previous blog post, I wasn’t too keen on how basic a couple of the textures looked. Therefore, I decided to apply a few realistic textures to my elevator to see how it turned out. To know the best place to download textures from, I watched a Youtube video suggesting a few of the best websites.

Video Suggesting Best Websites To Download Textures

All websites seemed pretty good; however, there was one website in particular that caught my attention.

So I began by downloading a fairly simple metal texture and applying it to the elevator’s doors and border.

I applied multiple maps to the material alongside the base color image. These were:

Roughness Map
Normal Map
Height/Displacement Map

The Next object I moved onto was the floor. I ideally wanted a marble texture for the floor as they’re typically found within elevators.

Afterward, I moved onto the elevator walls. I applied an AI Standard Surface material to them for the edges of the wall, which I’ll revisit later.

I then selected specific faces on one of the walls and applied a new material. For this material, I downloaded and used a wooden texture.

**Applied New Material With Texture On Selected Faces**

I then applied the new wooden texture onto the two remaining walls.

**Applied New Material On The Remaining Walls**

After adjusting the wooden texture to get the right appearance, I went back to the material I created before and applied a metal texture to them, completing the final look for the elevator walls.

**Applied Texture On The Original Material**

I then went on to texturing the poles found within the elevator walls. I didn’t use any downloaded textures for these as all I had to do was to make them somewhat metallic and reflective to achieve the appearance I wanted.

The last thing for me to do was apply the material to the elevator panels. These didn’t have to be anything special as they only needed to appear partially metallic, similarly to the poles.

Editing Textures In Substance Painter:

For the elevators’ buttons and indicators, I needed to include numbers and shapes on these objects. Therefore, I decided to export these objects as an FBX and import them into Substance Painter.

**Creating A New File In Substance Painter**

**Selecting Exported File From Maya To Open In Substance Painter**

Once I opened up my exported objects in Substance Painter, the first thing I had to do was bake the objects before placing any materials onto them.

I next browsed through the material library for any sort of material that appeared metallic, so that it would fit well with the elevator panel. I eventually decided to choose a chrome material to use as the foundation.

Afterward, I had to choose a font to use for my text. They didn’t have much of a selection to choose from; however, they still had a few there were ideal for elevator buttons.

After choosing the font I wanted, I placed it onto the first button and adjusted it so that it appeared to say what I wanted it to say, as well as rotating it and being the size I wanted.

I then repeated this procedure multiple times until I had the same look on each of the buttons.

The last thing for me to do was export the objects’ textures out so that I could apply them to the actual object itself in Maya.

Altogether, I had to repeat the process above four times, each for the outside and inside buttons, and for the outside and inside indicators.

Re-Texturing Environment:

At this stage I was really pleased with how my elevator looked, knowing that applying realistic textures made such a beneficial difference. Therefore, I looked back on the objects I textured last week to see how I could improve them. I began with the wallpaper texture. I wanted to keep that backrooms wallpaper pattern; however, I didn’t have any Normal maps, Roughness maps, and Height maps to go alongside it. Therefore, I decided to create my own.

I browsed through Youtube for tutorials on how to create those additional maps in Photoshop.

Video Tutorial On How To Create Normal & Height Maps In Photoshop

Video Tutorial On How To Create Roughness Maps In Photoshop

At this stage, I realised the wallpaper texture I currently had wasn’t completely seamless, meaning I had to find another wallpaper image that was seamless. Fortunately for me, I was able to find another backrooms wallpaper pattern that was entirely seamless.

I next downloaded a wall texture that would go with the new wallpaper image.

I opened up both the wall texture and the wallpaper image in Photoshop. I placed the wallpaper image on top of the wall texture and changed the Blending Mode to Overlay. This allowed us to visualise both images integrated together.

Following the steps found in the tutorials videos, to create the Normal map I had to select the image above and click on:

Filter > 3D > Generate Normal Map

To create the Height map, I had to click on:

Filter > 3D> Generate Bump (Height) Map

To create the Roughness map, I had to click on:

Image > Adjustment > Desaturate

Once I had created all of the additional maps, I went back into Maya and applied the newly created wallpaper texture onto my walls.

**Applied New Wallpaper Texture Onto The Walls**

Afterward, I applied the same texture to my Pillar’s materials so it had the same look as my wall.

I also repeated the process above for the edges of my wall. I took the downloaded wall texture into Photoshop and added a color overlay so that it appeared a shade darker than the wallpaper.

**Applied New Wallpaper Texture Onto Pillars & New Wall Edge Texture Onto Wall Edges**

The last thing I wanted to do was change the colour of my ceiling so that it appeared more yellow. I did this to make my environment more similar looking to the backrooms you see on the internet.

To do this, I repeated the same step above and took my ceiling’s base colour image into Photoshop and added a colour overlay on it, causing it to change from white to yellow.