Just a quick update this morning. Last night I spent my time on two things: UV mapping and terrain painting.

For those of you who don’t know, UV mapping is the process of “unwrapping” all the polygons in a 3D object onto a flat image so it can be painted with a texture. This process has gotten much easier in the last few years, thanks to some more sophisticated algorithms having been built into most of the 3D programs. Nevertheless, it is still very time consuming (and tedious).

After getting tired of trying to map UVs for one of my buildings, I decided to spend a little time creating a terrain. I have a fairly good idea how the terrain should be laid out for the opening area of the game world, so I started creating the rough, square shape of it. After about 10 seconds, I realized that making a terrain is considerably more entertaining than UV mapping. I then proceeded to spend so much time on it that I wasn’t able to write a blog post.

As I mentioned in my last post, creating art assets is likely to be the most time consuming aspect of this project. Visuals are, however, quite important, as a fellow blogger points out. While I’m just starting the process of modeling objects, I would like to take a moment to discuss texturing. The reason is simple. Yesterday I turned the crate I had so expertly modeled into a living, textured game object, and I am pleased.

This is premature, of course, since we have yet to come up with a texturing method (more on that in a moment) or even a color scheme for the first area of our game world. Nevertheless, in an effort to see what might be involved in creating a vibrant wooden object, I set out to texture my crate.

Now, there are really two main approaches to texturing:

• Painting — this is what the real artists do. Start with a base color in your favorite graphics program and gradually paint in details like highlights, shadows, texture (like wood grain or knots). If you’re curious, check out this tutorial on painting, yes, a crate. Painting can yield fantastic results because the possibilities for stylized textures are endless. Case in point, World of Warcraft.
• Photo-based texturing — It would be unfair to say this method is any less artistic than painting, but the desired effect is different. Photo texturing aims, as you might guess, at realism. Using this method, you would start with a photograph of your desired texture (a piece of wood or, better yet, the side of a crate) and manipulate it until it fits your desired style. My favorite example here is the Myst series.

Which method did I use? Well, neither. My 3D modeling program has a very nice procedural wood shader (which means it creates a texture from a program instead of an image file). So, instead of finding a crate to photograph or trying my off-hand at painting from scratch, I created a flat plane in Cheetah, added a wood shader, customized it by fiddling with some numbers, rendered it, and then used that rendered image as the starting point for my texture.

The result is certainly not going to change the world, but I was amazed how a couple hours of work could turn a drab gray cube into a crate just realistic enough not to be noticed — and for a crate in a video game, there is no greater accomplishment.