Introduction:
In this week’s blog post, I’ll be discussing the approach I took when it came to texturing the Backrooms environment, touching upon the methods I learned along the way and how they were beneficial. Lastly, I’ll be listing down the personal objectives that I’ve set for myself to complete by next week.
This Week’s Task:
I dedicated this week to texturing the environment I had just modeled last week. I wanted to give myself quite a bit of time for texturing as it is a field I’m not well experienced in, meaning I wanted to make time for changes and errors.
Texturing Floor:
I began by texturing the floor object. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if there were any online tutorial videos showing us how to texture the backrooms. Fortunately for me, I found a video; however. it was done through Blender, meaning it was helpful to a certain extent. The video provided us with a website where we could download the same images the person used for their textures. I clicked on the link and downloaded the image files.
After downloading the image files, I saw that the files came with other maps alongside the base colour map. These were:
- Roughness Map
- Normal Map
- Displacement Map
To get a full understanding of how and why to use these additional maps, I went onto Youtube to find a video that explained the differences between each map, and the effect they have on my texture.
Once I knew the effect of each map, I was ready to begin texturing my floor object. I began by applying an Ai Standard Surface shader to my object.
To apply a downloaded image onto my shader, I went into the Base Color options and created a file render node. This allowed me to browse for a file from my folders and load it up within the file attributes.
As you can see in the screenshot below, the floor image is far too big for my object and needs to be reduced in size and duplicated several times.
To accomplish this, I went into the 2d Texture PLacement Attributes and changed the Repeat UV number from 1 to 100, meaning it would duplicate 100 times each in the X and Y axis.
As you can see in the screenshots below, the checkered boxes have reduced in size, and have multiplied many times to form the floor I intended to create.
Now that I’ve applied the downloaded image to my floor and scaled it so it was the size I wanted, it was time for me to apply it to other additional maps to see how they would affect the appearance of my floor texture. I began by applying the Roughness map.
So that everything appeared correctly, I had to make sure that I repeated the Roughness map’s UV to match the Base Color‘s Repeat UV number, ensuring everything is aligned correctly.
Once I applied the Roughness map, I went on to apply the Normal map via the Bump Mapping options.
To ensure the Normal Map worked correctly, I had to switch the Use As options from Bump to Tangent Space Normals.
Once I applied the Normal map, the last thing for me to do was to apply the Displacement Map.
Within the Displacement Attributes, I have the option to adjust the scale of my Displacement map which will have a big impact on how my texture would appear.
After applying all additional maps to my texture, I rendered another image of the floor where I could see a significant difference.
Texturing Ceiling:
As I finished texturing the floor, I was ready to move on to my next object, which was the ceiling. I realised at this point, to ensure the ceiling appeared correctly with the textures, I had to create one big Polygon Plane, rather than the multiple planes I created last week. The ideal thing for me to do is duplicate the floor object. flip it over, and move it above.
I used the same procedure I used for the floor object by applying the Base Color map first, followed by the additional maps.
The ceiling image appeared too big for my object, meaning I had to change the Repeat UV value so that it decreased in size and multiplied several times.
After I was satisfied with the ceiling’s size appearance, I applied the remaining maps onto the texture and rendered out an image.
Texturing Walls:
The next task for me was to texture the walls. For the walls, I needed to have two separate textures applied, one being the wallpaper, and the other being the wall edges. As the wallpaper image needed specifically selected faces, I applied a default AI Standard Surface shader onto the walls for the wall edges now; however, I will revisit this texture later on.
Before I made my wallpaper texture, I browsed through Google for a seamless image of the wallpaper that’s typically found in the backrooms.
After downloading the image I wanted, I went back into Maya and selected the faces where I wanted the wallpaper image to be positioned, and created a new AI Standard Surface shader from those faces.
As you can see in the screenshot below, you can see the wallpaper image was far too big; therefore, I changed the Repeat UV value so that it was the size I wanted.
After getting the image to the size I wanted, I applied this texture to the same faces on the other walls.
Once I got to this stage, I wanted to adjust the colour of the wallpaper image because I believed it was too green for the appearance I was aiming for. Therefore, I took the downloaded image into Photoshop, and attached a Color Overlay effect onto the image layer, making it appear more yellow.
After creating and saving the new version of the wallpaper image, I reloaded it back into Maya. It changed the appearance of all walls as it still fell under one texture.
Now that I was finished with my wallpaper texture, it was time to revisit the wall texture I created beforehand. This texture would affect all sections of the wall beside the selected faces which were used for the wallpaper. In other words, It will affect the wall edges only. For the time being, I left the wall edges brown, but plan to adjust the colour once I’ve set up the lighting.
Texturing Pillars:
For the pillars, I used the same procedure I used for the walls as the pillars would also use the same wallpaper material. I started by applying an AI Standard Shader to the edges, changing them to the same colour I used for the wall edges.
Next, I selected the faces I needed and applied a new AI Standard Shader shader, and applied the wallpaper image to it.
The wallpaper image wasn’t the size I wanted so I changed the Repeat UV value until I got it to the size I wanted.
After achieving the size I wanted, I applied the texture onto the remaining pillars and rendered one last image to see how everything looked together.
From looking back at everything, I’m satisfied with how the floor and ceiling appear; however, I’m not too sure about the walls and pillars at this point in time. I may need to add more detail to the textures or just adjust the colour. With that said, I’ll leave them how they are now for the time being until I’ve finished setting up the lighting for this environment.
Objectives For Next Week:
- Texture Elevator.
- Make any adjustments to the environment’s textures if needed.