Materials and Mapping - Lab 2

After the previous lab session we looked more into how things can be textured. We touched this lightly in the previous session, but it was only two objects that we textured. We produced a couple of examples, one with the textures applied and the other with a specified colour. This week we delved deeper into texturing objects, creating more complex textures, with multiple objects. We looked further into lighting (creating new lights and repositioning them) to give us a variety of different effects. We also changed the material properties in order to assess the level of detail for example; we made lights of different colors, creating almost a strobe effect. A smoother shaded object obviously looked a lot more effective than a sharper material, so we incorporated that into our work. This was mainly done using the ‘set smooth’ button, but other ways this can be done is by adding a subsurf modifier. The only problem with the subsurf modifier is that with objects containing a vast amount of vertices require large amount of computational power to render, something that can crash the system if we’re not careful! This will be explored further in future labs. We wanted to learn more about applying textures through a UV editor, so we set our sights to this goal and produced some interesting results! We produced a small basic room using a cube and then scaled it so that we could place objects inside it. Inside the room we created a table with a glass top and a chessboard on top of the glass surface. If we look closely at the picture we can actually see the chessboards reflection in the glass! We then textured the walls, ceiling and floor to add a bit more realism. Obviously at an early stage the level of detail isn’t industry standard but it’s still a good attempt! The chessboard was textured by subdividing the plane and coloring the squares in the same way a chessboard does.