Texturing in a non destructive way

Final Texture

Before beginning my textures, I chose to make a moodboard of all the kinds of materials and references I wanted to include for my chest. This included references for locations the chest may be, other artworks made for aspects such as the leaves and coins, the style of metal I wanted to create for my final chest look, and the colour of wood I wanted to use. I also made a small colour swatch throughout, with emphasis on collecting images that fit into a complementary colour scheme. I annotated my thoughts throughout, and gave insight on what references I wanted to use and why.

Moodboard

After this, I began work on the various sections of the chest. The chest had been split into many texture maps, so many in fact that if I was to redo this project I would have removed many of the maps or combined them together.

There was a map for:

The lid and main box

This texture was made using gradient maps, so that I could focus on values before colour. I really did struggle with getting the metal to look like metal, however it looks somewhat connected and natural with all the other textures being more of a soft effect, so I like to think this style helped bring the whole concept together. I also used custom shapes on a low opacity layered multiple times to bring some green moss onto the purple mahogany colour, which stopped making the chest look so clean as I was struggling with how to make it look like it was sat in its environment undisturbed for a very long time. I used the same technique for overlaying some grime or dirt or imperfections on the metal, as it also was looking too clean to be sat in a jungle for so long.

Leaves and Coins

This texture was a very detailed texture and I used influence from my moodboard. The leaf texture made heavy use of the polygonal lasso tool and many layers to add detail, while the coin texture used many layers of custom shapes.

Vine, Base and Hinges

This was a very easy texture to make in that the way vines look naturally anyway is lots of overlaying sections together, and so I made many brush strokes in the texture area for the vines matching them up somewhat with each other. The vines also needed a pass of moss which was with a very soft brush and a grass custom object layered on top to add more depth. The base of the coins and the hinges were very simple - the hinges were very small assets and so I gave them a quick bronze colour pass, while the coins was just a copy of the top of my coin texture repeated many times, with a colour dodge on low opacity in the centre to make it look like it was glowing. There was also a multiply layer for the coins afterwards, since there was an issue where the light had made all the edges of the coins blend together unnaturally. I also did a plant debris pass to make sure that the leaves in the chest as well as the general debris all over the chest continued to the inside to give a cohesive look.

Mushrooms and plinth

The plinth texture was mostly made with custom shape stone texture and then custom shapes again for the moss texture to keep a consistent look for the moss, while the mushroom was mostly just filled in with brush mark made circles.