Shop Front 3 - Chad's Bar and Grill

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I'm just going to start with a warning that this is going to be a massive art/screenshot dump again. I hope it's not a problem, I doubt you would want endless paragraphs of writing anyway over just showing you loads of process pictures, but I'll help out when I can though. 

  

I started texturing by getting what I thought might be the most labour-intensive part out of the way first: the planks. Because there were alot of them I thought that doing them first would help the model look a lot more closer to completion.

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 The hardest part I think was making the texture on the metal parts of the model, it had to be a good balance between PBR metal and handpainted details, at first it was pointed out the metal was too shiny so I dialled it back a little bit. I also added some panel lines as I thought it made the metal look a bit more interesting compared to just a plain dirty surface. 

Emissives were also added to the scene, and I worked on the lighting a little bit (one of my favourite areas) I tried to balance out the lighting and the background colours aswell as adjusting the exposure.

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Texture Techniques

I did try out some different techniques for the handpainted textures, I tried a mix of things to help me speed up the process. The biggest one was the use of the mixer brush to create edge highlights on the metal parts and to mix up background values for objects.

For the edge highlights I had my UVW lines at the top of my layer stack in photoshop, I set this to screen layer mode so I just had the white lines. If I wanted a colour I would add a fill layer set to overlay ontop of the lines with a clipping mask.

I would have a layer underneath somewhere that I would use for painting using the mixer brush. I made sure the mixer brush settings were set to 'Sample All Layers'.

With the UV lines still visible and your paint layer selected start to trace over the lines where you need edge highlights, with a little bit of trial and error you will see that you can use this to create painterly lines really quickly on your model exactly where you need them. To tidy them up just switch your UV lines to invisible and carry on smudging where you can see pixelization. 

In the sheet below you can see an example of where this technique has been used on the edges of metal objects:

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Final Screens

Here are my final screenshots at the end of texturing and after I have replaced the other parts of the mesh. 

 

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 I'm surprised with how the end result of this project would turn out, It wasn't coming together in my head until the texturing stage, which would pretty much make or break this piece. The metal was hard to  pull off but as you can see in the screenshot above it reacts well to the environment but isn't too overpowering.

For things I would improve, I think I would like to add more clutter to the interior. My tricount was almost maxed out on this project and I didn't have a lot of texture space left but If I were to do somethings differently like texture the letters on the sign rather than model I could save on tris and texture space allowing for other things. Some posters and hanging receipts in the interior could help come character and interest to the walls.

Another thing I would do is add more definition of details to the RV on the top, the texture looks a bit too simple to me and lacks edge details like the bottom food truck, just a few things like some lines and areas of implied lighting could help make the texture pop more.

Next Project

My next project is something I have had stewing in my head for a while but I've been waiting for an opportunity to do it, it's a location from my own fictional universe. The basic premise is a hollow-earth kind of environment where it's effectively a massive cave that houses a fake sun, with the environment being one of the structures that suspend from the cave ceiling.

I'm going to be doing this for the Sci-Fi through-the-gate project so I'm really excited about it, more details next time. :)