The Haunted Mansion: Texturing

Bowl, Plates and Platter

I started off with my most simple meshes, the plates and bowls. I firstly took my UVs as snapshots to photoshop and sketched up a couple of decals for the plate rims and base but I decided to keep the rims plain and focus more on the designs for the main area. I looked into other ornate plate designs and sketched up a few ideas that matched our taxidermist décor. Top and bottom sets of canine teeth, ornate leaves and flowers (inspired by decorated plates I found when researching ideas), and a canine skull were the designs I painted for the different dinnerware, each mesh with a different assembly of these.

Bowl

I started off with the bowl, for which I designed the skull and 4 sided teeth set. One of the main things I wanted to try out was adding height to my painted design. It came out like this;

This looks really nice, in my opinion, but only in the clean version. I wanted to have the design look almost scratched off in the dirtied versions but this didn’t work as I wanted it to when the height was on. Thankfully the ‘painted’ look was also very nice and though the embossed version adds more detail, I liked the sleekness of the no height version.

Distressed

Adding the dirt and cracks to the bowl was really enjoyable! Although I have a lot to learn still, I do have a lot of fun with texturing. I used a generator with a dirt material so the distressing looks quite realistic. I went in and added cracks by hand using one of the substance brushes and painting in the rest of the crack so that it followed the stamp’s lines. As pictured here, the crack along the bowl looks quite good with the embossed decal! But having the decal look faded or chipped away was a bit tricky, and the cracks still looked grand when it looked painted, anyway.

I added a couple more chips to the sides of the plate, another larger crack and fixed up the layer properties so that the gold rim, red side rim and rest of the plate all had different metallic and roughness values. I had the red rim the most metallic, and I thought this added a little more interest to the design so I kept this choice for all the other meshes.

I used this short video to see how they exported the textures, they used the unreal4 packed file setting and I found this worked well.

Plate

After the decisions made from the bowl, I knew the settings I wanted for the plate to match. I kept the design looking like it was painted/printed onto the plate and added the rim settings. I actually designed the plates teeth and floral decal first and based all of the other designs on this.

The process is similar to the bowl, however, though I liked the plain shininess of the plate I wanted to try adding some texture with a copper material. I thought this looked good when imported into unreal but ultimately didn’t work when with the dirtied version, where it just looked too crowded. I preferred the contrast between the shiny, clean plate and the cracked, scratched, dirty plate.

Distressed

As the plate will most likely be more used in the environment than the bowl, small plate or platter I wanted to have a few different versions of the dirty plate for my team members to pick and choose with. I just randomised the dirt material and had one version with cracks, one without, and one with only a few scratches.

Small Plate

Unlike the big plate, I wanted the small plate to match with the bowl; so the top rim is the same yellow with its side rims red, however, to keep the consistency with the large plate there are 2 red linings. Other than this, and the different base design of flowers and the canine skull, the process is the same.

Distressed

Platter

The platter is only floral, as I was expecting some stretching. Still, the design isn’t that warped! The rims again are coloured to match the plate, red as the top and yellow for the sides. I imagined the platter would be of a more metallic material instead of ceramic-like the others, so no heightened cracks for the platter, but more metallic settings.

Distressed

Carpet

I sketched up a few different patterns and designs for the carpet, but I liked the red gradient the most as it further mimics the look of a tongue, as the mesh is based off.

After sending this screenshot to my group, they all agreed that the texture is a bit too much and that I could try adding noise to the carpet for texture, instead of a substance material. I wanted to have a bit of height in the texture, to add a little more detail.

I decided to restart the carpet, as I edited the mesh itself to have folds and wrinkles by sculpting in Maya, which didn’t affect the UVs thankfully! (It did however up the polycount, but its not too much.) When I retextured the carpet I only kept one gradient, for a bit of variation and had a much smoother texture on top, just enough to be seen when close.

Broom

I was more experienced now with Substance Painter and decided to tackle the broom. I knew the style direction I wanted to go with for the broom’s wooden handle, and taking inspiration from my groups’ wooden asset textures, I wanted the stick to look rugged and sharp, but still stylized. It took quite a while to get the designs I wanted, there were many times I erased some of the frontal groove designs as there were too many tangent lines (like those in the screenshot), but I based everything off of the branch stubs in the mesh firstly (circling around them). There are still parts of the handle design I think I will go back and fix.

I added a light linear gradient generator as well, I will probably go back and change the colours before exporting it into unreal, but for now the visual design, I think, is good.

The bristles of the broom were more challenging to design. I started off by accentuating the mesh’s grooves with a darker brown, with a fill layer on a black mask.

I liked the stylised, indented lines along with the bristles I saw from my artist research in Sketchfab, so I decided to stick with a very simple style for the bristles and just painted some lines near the ties and the ends. These had the slight height to them as well, so they would match the handle’s painted style and stand out when lit giving the bristles a little bit more detail. I really like the look this gave! I painted the grooves with a textured brush to give the illusion of texture, also. To add a little bit more depth to the underside I shaded around the bumps; whether these will be seen or not, I wanted to help show them with some extra shading.

As for the ties around the bristles, I wasn’t sure if I wanted these to appear fabric or metallic in nature but after trying some smart materials on them I decided that leather/plastic looked best! The actual material used on it is ‘plastic rough scratched’, just edited so that the height isn’t as noticeable and the colour completely off so that just the texture settings remain on the red I wanted.

I think it looks good but does kind of stand out against the hand-painted bristles and shaft, but since the area is so small and not the focus of the model I think it looks fine.

Finished Broom

Fire Place and Accessories

I kept the fireplace for last, as I wanted a bit more experience with the other models before moving to my biggest. I finished it much quicker than the others because of this, and I think it came out to be one of my best!

There’s substance materials on the guard, base and bricks, just a little bit to add some detail like the concrete on the bricks and base, and rust on the guard. The rest of the fireplace is hand painted! I kept the palette simple, refencing a picture of bricks I found online for the colours and shading. I didn’t want this too realistically detailed with generators and materials, or it would stick out when in the scene with other objects which are mostly hand painted so when it came to places like the mantle I used the same technique I had for the broom’s shaft, to add some chunky wood grain. I went around all the edges of the model also with a dark brown on a textured brush, to further add some grunge and detail. I think the fireplace turned out really cool!