A couple of weeks ago I had chosen to do a satanic book as my creative & technical model, however this idea was changed to an axe as I thought it was more interesting. I had created the book mesh around this time as well nut I have only just returned to it today to finish it off. For this model I did a low to high poly workflow. I started out by creating the low poly mesh and then from this I UV unwrapped it.
To make sure that the UV unwrap was being done correctly I added a checker-board texture to the model, once all of the checkers were basically the same size I then duplicated the low poly model and began to add more detail and create the High poly version.
The poly count between the low and the high was not that different as the book did not have all that much detail as all of the detail would be added in the texture. The high poly had smooth edges all around.
I then changed the names of the high and low poly meshes using the prefix _low & _high. Once this was done I exported the objects as .FBX files and imported them into Substance Painter. I chose to bake within substance as I am more familiar with this than maya/max. I believe the bake turned out well.
Once the bake was done I began working on the texture, this was my favourite part of the creation of the model as it allowed me to be creative and test out some more brushes and alphas within substance. For the paper I used a smart material that I sourced from substance share. This was the base layer that would create the general paper material however I changed the colour to be more stained to allow the book to look older so that it would fit with the theme. I had also sourced some satanic symbols from the internet that I imported into substance as alphas. This allowed me to stamp these images on.
To add more overall detail I added some blood, dirt and scratches to make the book look even more worn. I asked for some feedback from my group and Ben suggested that I make the blood more red and defined, this was because there was not much of a colour difference between the blood and the dirt; so I made these changes. I also added some lines to the edge of the book to make it look like it has pages rather than it being a solid object. For the cover of the book I also added some grunge but made it more of a yellow colour so that it looked as if the leather was peeling away in parts. Finally I splashed a couple of other brushes around to make it look even more worn, this was the final texture.
I am proud of this book and the texture I have created for it so I created a little portfolio page in case I chose to use this for my portfolio later in the year.
joshforrestnextgen 