Thesis Texturing

One of the important parts of my thesis project will be texture mapping. I want things to age over the course of my film, and I plan to use a combination of photographs and procedural shading. I have compiled a list of the rooms that will be in my project, as well as the textures I will need for them according to the decade in which they appear. Additionally, I've included columns for audio, mood and other components relative to each shot. It's a way for me to organize my ideas and also "pre-storyboard," in a way.
I've used this spreadsheet to help myself figure out which textures I need to photograph and in turn plan where I should take them. For example, I knew that I would need plenty of brick and concrete to texture map the exterior shots of the apartment building, so I headed to downtown Providence, RI and also downtown Los Angeles because I knew there were plenty of industrial buildings. I was shooting with a digital SLR that had RAW format in 8 megapixels, so I knew I would have plenty of resolution to work with when it came time to creating my texture maps for Maya.

I tried to get a variation of surfaces, ranging from pristine to worn down, to help me indicate the passage of time. Finding dirty textures was actually somewhat fun, and it was also nice to know that I would have to do much less work creating grunge and imperfections with shaders in Maya.

I tried to photograph textures as orthographically as possible, and get as far away as possible so that I would not have to repeat them when I applied them to geometry. Additionally, I tried to shoot them so that the lighting was consistent across them and would therefore give me the ability to use them at all times of day and in any lighting conditions.

I'm organizing my textures by type rather than by scene so that I can easily locate materials I need. This will help to streamline my texturing process in that I will probably end up with dozens, if not hundreds, of materials that I will have to manage.

Although most of my textures were shot outdoors, I do plan on using many of them, especially the plaster and wood ones, in my interiors. It's just a matter of simple color correction, and chances are that I will even just use some as bump maps.

Concrete


Brick

PlasterWood
Misc.
I also photographed some objects so that I could camera project textures in Maya, and create 2D camera moves from static 2D images. My Visual Effects Society Mentor, Van Ling, gave me some great advice on how to incorporate camera mapping into my project. For one thing, it would help to save time in lighting in rendering. Secondly, it would be great for using as backgrounds so that the CG objects would not look so CG when seen in the same shot.

Potential Camera Projections