This week I plan to go over how I have gone about making the textures for the building pieces and show some progress I've made with the new deck piece.

The texturing process involves creating and modifying what is called a UV Map. A UV Map takes a 2d texture image and tells which parts are applied to specific areas of the model. Maya has several methods for creating UV Maps, all with their own strengths and weaknesses, of which I chose to use the automatic mapping feature due to its ease of use, and accurate UV proportions. The major flaw with the automatic mapping is that it can create a messy UV layout which needs cleaning up.


One of the reasons this UV Map is messy is that it places every UV/polygon face in the map so that nothing overlaps which can a good thing except when there multiple pieces that will have the same texture. These UVs can overlap in order to free up space and lessen the amount of texturing needed. Freeing up space also allows us to scale up the UVs and in doing so, raises their resolution. Another part of this cleaning process is to fix, or rearrange the seams between UVs. When there's a seam in the UVs, there is a noticeable edge in the textures that would otherwise not exist. Seams are unavoidable in UV Maps as they are 2d images on a 3d model. The solution to these seams is to hide or place them in areas that are appropriate(such as a corner on a rectangular piece. Here is a cleaned up version of the deck's UV Map.
As you can see I grouped similar pieces and scaled the image up with more scaling on a few of the smaller pieces in order to get more detail.



Here are a few examples that show the progression of the textures on the deck model.