Texturing my Final Model

When it came to making sure my layout was good, i did run into a problem, where it kept laying out the model, but in very small pieces.  However after fiddling around with the layout option for 20 minutes I was able to fix that problem.  Once I had my first layout I saved it and went onto texturing it.

I put a base layer down and also UV checkered it, once I'd put the texture on, I'd save it out to maya to make sure I was doing it right.  I did however have a couple of major problem's with the layout, first the UV's weren't taking up as much space as they should, this problem was fixed with the help of one of the tutors, who sat down and helped me to make a better layout for the model than before. The second layout did come with a price, the smaller pieces connected together in the model, but separate in the layout where moved apart, nightmare to fix that.  Two it was taking way to long to get through the first line.  Mainly because I chipped away, I have to make sure everything is connected the right way. 

These next photos explain how different the layout's are, the closer one is my recent one while the one on the left is my older version because parts of the layout where difficult to find, one of the tutors suggest I colour code it to see where everything is, I also added arrows to help find out which end was which side.

For Texturing I used basic brick textures taken from CG textures combined with laying them out carefully and making sure they meet with another angle, or close enough.  I took full advantage of using the layer options in Photoshop to help me achieve the sandstone texture I was looking for.  I using a mixture of grunge maps to give it some history in some areas and adding green mossy paint to add the better organic flow to it.  this was the end result.

These extra maps really helped me achieve my overall goal in bringing out the design  more, the diffuse map was finished and I'm ready to move on, however some problems did occur when trying to upload my Normal maps.  Using the diffuse as a base map I added more whites to the scene to make sure that most of the model had a good balance.  However for some reason, whenever I applied the bump map it kept applying it to the older layout option, this then caused the texture to go back to it's original layout.  But thanks to the help from a 2nd year I was able to correct this problem and finish the normal maps.

Height and Normal Maps

Specular Maps

Because I was successful with the Normal map, I added a Specular Map to bring out the highlights more.