The scene is broken up into 4 texture sheets: the ground, the props, the chest, and the glowing exclamation mark. The chest could be also a part of the prop atlas but since it was the key object it made me think of giving it its own texture. In game dev, you’ll always want your hero asset to be more detailed than its surrounding to draw the player’s attention and focus.

Throughout my texturing process, I used just a hard round brush with its opacity set to transfer so it could match a painterly style of the concept. This brush, along with alt-clicking to color pick is like my bread and butter in case of hand-painted texturing. It allows me to quickly blend colors and control the sharpness of blending. Like with modeling, I first start texturing the largest, most prominent features because they are the most influential to the piece. Generally, I always texture everything in passes. I’d block out the colors for all the assets and work up detail in passes across everything evenly so that all the assets have the same quality throughout the process. This helps me keep everything balanced and avoid focusing on some parts for too long.

Texturing this piece was a lot of fun because I could use broad, sweeping strokes and avoid doing much of cleanup. Hand-painted texturing is probably one of my favorite parts of creating game art, there’s something really relaxing about blending colors and creating sharp details to bring life to my models. To maintain accuracy I would regularly save and check my work in Maya and compare my work with the concept. This proved to be rather time-consuming than if I was making something from scratch because I had to continuously check for mistakes. However, I felt that this was the best way to maintain the level of accuracy I desired.

Foliage

The foliage on the round oak tree and bushes felt like the most tedious and time-consuming part of this piece. They consist of individual alpha cards placed on top of spheres. I UV mapped groups of these planes to their corresponding color in the concept to save time rather than making each leaf individually which would have been ridiculously long. I separated the colors into three groups: highlights, mid-tones, and shadows. Each group had 3 variants of colors that I would pick from. Placing the planes and matching them to the concept took much time but it was also the best way to fit the concept. If I were to make trees like this ever again without following a concept I would procedurally place the alpha cards along the sphere meshes using MASH. MASH is a fantastic tool built into Maya. It’s very useful in environment creation and it allows you to procedurally place selected objects around a scene or another object, with lots of nodes to randomize the values like position, rotation, and scale.