Tutorial: Texturing and Lighting

Texturing

Today we had a tutorial in texturing and lighting using the Lego man from the previous tutorial.
The tutorial consisted of:

-How to create a material from scratch with the basic usage of each of the material properties in the material editor (colour, diffuse, reflection, bump, etc).

-Using images within each property in the material editor.
Using images to affect the various properties. Examples were given on how to take a texture such as an image of a scratched surface and using within the bump channel to make the surface 'bump'out as in the image, or using it as a reflection map so the material will reflect that image as though it is part of the enviroment. Examples were given for each channel(property) within the material editor.

-Creating the face on the lego mans head.
using an image created in photoshop to map into the colour channel of the material for the head. We were shown how to position the image/texture so it appears correctly on the model.

The exercise was repeated to create an image on the torso. An example was given where the texture can be applied to only one polygon.

I decided to make a lego 'dennis the menace' and created the following textures in photoshop. The face is copied from my reference image.

The following Image shows how the 'face' texture is applied into the colour properties of a material. It also shows which properties i have turned on for my lego material. Color, reflection and specular are used.

The following image shows the material applied to the head, and the settings that are adjusted to fit the image to the model correctly. cylindrical mapping gave the best fit for the head.


I applied the other textures in the same way. The body worked best with cubic mapping and the arms were best left with the default uvw mapping.

3Point Lighting

The next part of the lesson was a tutorial in 3 point lighting. 3 point lighting is good for realistically lighting an object, without drastically increasing render times. Better looking methods of lighting are available although these can cause much longer rendering times.

The tutor created his 3 point lighting setup that consisted of:

Backlight-An area light placed behind the object being lit, to simulate 'bounced' light.

Arealight-Another area light scaled quite large and positioned directly above the object to be lit. The brightness is lowered on this light to create the right effect.

Main light-Placed in front of the object in the same direction as the camera. The tutor had turned on shadows for this light only.

Image shows the result of the tutorial.

I played around with this setup and found that the scene looked much better with the ground plane being excluded from illumination by the backlight and area light.

The Image below shows results after changing the brightness of each light and repositioning them slightly. only the main light affects the floor. While all 3 lights affect the character.