texturing project and experiments

[Captain_Ahab]

In order to promote more traffic to this site, I've decided to regularly post experiments with texturing and modeling.
What I'm doing is making models in Blender of the walls, floors, etc. for things I want to make textures of.
Then I'm rendering them with Environmental lighting ( no specified light sources to prevent shadows ) to give me a diffuse layer.
Baking AO, height maps and normal maps from the model itself.

Here is a render of a stone wall WIP. Beleive it or not, this model has a bit over a million faces for normal/height map details
I have a lot to learn and a lot to improve upon so far.
Next to bake normal/height and spec maps.

[Captain_Ahab]

well.. this has been a bit of a failure
Making this sort of thing seamless is a pain. The easy tools in GIMP aren't handling this well and doing it the hard way is too much like actual work.
I'll have to find a different way and make it seamless during the modelling itself and not afterwards. Oh well...Kevin Johnstone does say that the " The grid is god for an environment artist. "

[tyche]

Captain Ahab - look in packages/tyche for examples of textures made from samples of photographs of actual materials.

[Captain_Ahab]

Thanks for the advice, but I'm trying to do something a little bit different.
I can make textures from photos easy enough, but here, I'm trying to actually model the surface of the texture to some degree, such that blender can generate AO, normal and depth maps for me.
I will be forced to teach myself sculpting as well.
Also, in order to learn blender's material system a bit better, I'm trying to make things with procedural materials instead of photos.

By making everything myself, I can be absolutely certain that I won't be violating anyone's copyright by accident, too