Common Crate

by Monica A. Lazar 19:17 0 comentarii

My intention for this crate was to create my own texture, starting from scratch, but I found a very nice cartoony wood pattern which I decided to improve eventually. The crate was created for a game or a level that is set in a carnival atmosphere, as it contains fireworks (I thought that it would be nice for some of those crates to be set on fire, at some point, to distract people attending the carnival).

First, the model of the crate: I made a square in Maya, which I extruded, rescaled the extruded part and then intruded it. I duplicated it five times and then arranged the faces so that they form a cube. I took care to align the edges and I merged a couple of vertexes (the ones in the corners) so that I have no blank spaces.

I made the UVs for one face (as the others will have the exact same UVs) and made a UV Snapshot in order to bring them in Photoshop. I found my main texture and I removed the watermark from it, using Clone Stamp Tool and Patch Tool. It looked a little awkward at first, but I managed to correct that by painting some lines in that area. For that, I used Eyedropper Tool and I had set my opacity at about 50 before I started painting. Some lines were emphasized, in order to draw the attention to them and not to my lines. Patch Tool was used in some areas to create some cracks (for example, I took some cracks from the last plank of the texture and put them on the first one, adjusting the size, so it doesn't look similar). I ended up adding some shades, especially in the corners, so that the crate would look a little used. 

I used different kind of planks for the borders and changed their contrast in order to fit the other planks. A little distortion was needed, but it turned out that perspective works a lot better for me in this case. The pins were a little out of their place, but with Patch Tool, that has been fixed very easily.

The last thing to do was to make them look like crates which contain exclusively fireworks, so I added some markings to emphasize this. Eventually, for the sake of clarity, I added some text as well.