Model 6: The Temple (Part Two)

For this final blog post on Maya, I will be talking about the texturing of the temple and what problems I had encountered therein.

Once the model had been done, the task was to texture it. We were given tilable textures which meant that they were easier to apply to things like roofs and walls. As I am not that confident in texturing in Maya, this was a problem for me as I was not sure what I had to do with them.

The first step, like the modeling of the temple, was to work at it methodically. That means I had to think about what order to do the texturea in. This was not that much of a problem. I looked at it this way and in the order that I modeled it:

Walls
Roofs
Decal (they were the bits that went on the roofs as decoration and just extras to the temple - done with shaders).

I first assigned a Blinn to the object by holding the Right Mouse Button and then going down to the Assign New Material and then Blinn. From there I could go into the Blinn and then assign a file to use. That would have been the wall or the roof texture (depending on what I was using).

From there I chose one of these textures:

The red one is the one for the roof and the second one for the walls.

To sort out the textures I selected a face (or faces) and then added a mapping which is how the texture is applied to the object. For this I chose Planar mapping with certain options selected to let me choose what plane the material was going to be applied to. With that I went into the tool known as UV Editor and used tools to rotate and scale the texture of the object much like I would in the Maya editor. 

Now that was done, I used the same technique for every part of the temple that had an appropriate texture to get something from this:

TO THIS:

The spikes on the top of the middle building, the fences and bars were all shaded with a colour done in a very similar way to texturing but instead of adding a file I just added a colour to it.

Overall through this task, the hardest part was getting the proportions of the temple correct in relation to the rest of it, if one part felt wrong I had to change more than that part to get it right in how I saw it and the same was for the texturing. There were a lot of final touches I had to do and tweaks to try and get it done to the best that I could do. 

I enjoyed the task and it was fun for me to see how far I had gotten and how much I can push myself in Maya and knowing that there is still so much more I can do.