I got alot accomplished today.  I continued with my texturing efforts and started texturing the hotel.  This is the most important building in the scene since its the biggest and stands out the most.  I really wanted to work on my attention to detail while working on it.

One feature that I programmed for verto yesterday that has proven insanely invaluable to me is the unwrap texture feature.  This feature maps polygons to one of 6 faces of a virtual box and assigns them their own coordinates within the UV texture space.  In lamens terms, it makes texturing box-like objects a hell of alot easier.  It works best when the object has some flat shading enabled.

I finished texturing the supermarket yesterday but I’m not all that satisfied with it.  I’ll probably revisit it when the rest of the street is further along.

The hotel on the other hand, is looking really nice.  Sometimes its all about finding the right texture.  I found an excellent brick texture via turbosquid.  I then ran it through my favorite filter:  gimp’s “make seamless”.  Lastly, I created a normal-map for it using the “crazy bump” tool for mac.  All rendered with bumpmapping, the hotel front looks great.

Perhaps the most fun part of today was painting the sign decal texture for the sign that sits above the left shop in the hotel.  For someone who’s a crappy artist, I felt like I didn’t do too bad of a job.  After throwing in a few references to name’s of my buddys, I got it all ready to go.  I render it using a simple alpha-test shader.

Last but not least, I took on the “opaque window” shader that will be used on all the non-transparent windows in the scene.  I tried a flat reflective environment mapping effect but it looked pretty unrealistic.  Since we’re in the early 30′s here, I figured that I would simulate “wavy” or “mildly bumpy” glass.  This means combining bumpmapping and environment mapping shader techniques.  The result is very awesome.

Working on this game is proving to be too fun.  Sadly, I should probably do some non-game-related work on Verto Studio tomorrow and return to this stuff next week.