Modeling/Art non-related to Amnesia / SOMA

[The chaser]

Spoiler below!

Hmmm... Texturing... Looking at the examples from the previous page and the current page I'd say texturing is something you desperately need to work more on. In creating a good-looking model a lot comes down to the texturing - if your wooden beam has something on it which doesn't look like "wood" all work on the geometry of the beam is in vain. I'm not saying that I'm good at texturing, because I'm not - not yet I'll be using one of my "hand-painted" textures for reference though. In case you want to hear it from someone good look at this:
http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/photosh...-textures/

This thing with Traggey is nice:
http://www.frictionalgames.com/forum/thread-21311.html


Here are my diffuse and specular "from scratch":
Work process:
1. Create highpoly model + lowpoly model
2. Bake details in Xnormal
3. In step 2 normal map + AO is created
4. Create displacement from normal map (think Traggey does this through a plugin in photoshop)
5. Paint basic colors --> In this diffuse: Orange, gray, dark gray
6. Overlay AO
7. Use displacement + Levels tool in photoshop to either put dust/grime in crevices or scratches on heights. This is "randomized" through the use of brushes. These layers are used as masks.
8. Work out unique details; dirt/text/blotches/color fades off paint etc.
[spoiler]

The specular I create through grayscaling all of my diffuse layers. I can then easily adjust the brightness of each individual layer - dust, scratches, each "basepaint" from (5). So, for example, the painted metal = orange = darker than the surrounding metal. The brighter the more reflective - so dust is darker, metal is brighter. As you may notice on inspection there are lighter cracks in the painted metal. That is because those are the scratches where paint has been removed and the metal underneath can be seen. That way I can quickly create a specular. The ambient occlusion is replaced by a another mask.

Spoiler below!

After that I create the gloss through hiding all shadowing AO etc. to just get flat colors. I also hide all scratches - only keeping the basecolors from (5) and any eventual dust/grime. The brighter the gloss - the more focused the radius of the light which shines on the object.
--- Gloss not included ---


If anyone is genuinly interested I'd be happy to answer questions - since this is quite a sloppy writeup. Hopefully the videos I posted will keep you occupied - as basically what I've written above has been extracted from those + my own testing :]

Good luck!
[/spoiler]

Wow, many thanks for that wall! I still need to download Xnormal, I want to give it a try!

I followed this tutorial,, in case someone wants to use it:

http://gimpchat.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=4285