The scene used in this tutorial was used as a promotional image for the upgrade to the Total Textures V7 – Sci-Fi collection.

Commonly these images are small renders designed for use on the sales page of the 3Dtotal website and as such are not lengthy projects. Therefore being able to get maximum impact with minimum effort is important. As a result I often do not spend time modelling the details especially when the aim of the exercise is to promote the value of textures.

In Fig01 you can see how simple the scene actually is in terms of geometry.
Being a corridor means that the scene can incorporate a number of repeated panel sections along the floor and walls.

Any piece of geometry that is mapped retains the mapping co-ordinates when it is duplicated and so in this instance it is wise to first of all map any section that is repeated and then use this to build any identical sections. In Fig01 you can see that the wall panel (red outline) and floor panel (blue outline) can be mapped and then copied to form the sections labelled a,b and c. This will save a considerable amount of texture space as opposed to unwrapping everything individually as each similar component will share exactly the same co-ordinates. To avoid repeatable patterns the UV’s on individual panels could be manually moved slightly or even flipped. It all comes down to preference in the end and how much time and texture memory is available but this is an effective way of saving both time and texture space.

Fig01 shows all the lighting that will be present in the final render. The overall green colour has been generated by a self illuminated dome covering the scene which generates the main ambient light in conjuction with Final Gather. There are two spots above the two doorways and the coloured dots at the far end will represent glows from control panels that correspond to areas of the texture.

Because this is a simple scene with duplicated geometry I made the corridor into a single mesh and applied a Muti Sub Object material which is easily manageable. This meant that I could assign different ID numbers to the polys that represent the different parts of the scene.

In Fig 02-03 you can see the how the materials relate to the scene. The first material was used behind the camera so was later deleted and the red door at the far end was a separate material, hence its absence from the list.

I chose a selection of textures from the new collection that would suit some of the proportions of the various panels and then tweaked the Uv’s to get them to fit neatly into position.

With all the Diffuse maps applied the scene looks as shown in Fig04. These are all the colour maps seen under the  final lighting conditions. You will notice how dark and monochromatic everything looks, almost as though being viewed through a tinted visor.

The scene as a whole looks very dull and lacks any dynamic contrast. The lighting in the scene is far from bright and when you look at Fig05 you can see how low the level actually is. In truth there are two further lights in the scene, however these are set to only effect specularity and so without any specular maps their presence is hidden.