Weathering the storm

As I said before, adding wear and tear truly helps sell a believable image, because it randomizes otherwise predictable patterns and also gives a sense of scale. Here's an updated image with several texturing revisions, namely on the hero apartment's stairs and front entrance, as well as some tweaked grunge maps on the brick facade.

For the stairs, I ended up having to re-model them before re-texturing, because the original texture maps were too cumbersome when it came to making the grout look like it adhered to the step above it and the step below it. Previously, I'd created each step as a individual objects so that I could easily move each one around on its own, and avoid laying out UVs over and over again. However, this backfired on me, since it was just as easy to create a single object with all the stairs in it, and lay out the UVs fairly quickly. Additionally, this method yielded fewer polygons (which I'm subdividing at render time) and it was very easy to Photoshop the grout between adjacent steps. Luckily, I had built my texture to have its layers clearly organized in Photoshop, and I was able to re-use the majority of this file when I tailored it to the new staircase object. Additionally, after I'd re-modeled and textured the stairs, a friend of mine noted how rigid and straight the stairs looked, and how they would be more worn out in the middle from years of use. I completely agreed, and was able to quickly fix this by adding in some extra cuts to the stairs and "bowing" them downwards in the center. Because I'm subdividing the geometry at render time, I end up getting a nice, smoothly curved ridge. Another nice part of this quick fix was that I did not have to lay out my UV's or alter my texture maps in any way.

The previous texture maps for the entrance were bothering me because they felt too flat and inorganic. I'd been using basic shaders with procedural color inputs, and was using Photoshopped images from photographs for the bump maps. For the revision, I ended up creating both the color and bump maps from photographs, and I think that the result is much more convincing and pleasing to the eye.

I also added in a slate tile texture to the upper front roofing, and fixed the shading on the white window sills on the apartment to the left because they were far too flat. A minor change with what I see as having a major payoff is the grime on the brick facade of the hero apartment. If you look at previous renders, you'll notice that the grunge (especially the green mildew that goes vertically along the left, middle and side of the building) seems to simply rest on top of the brick and grout evenly. I felt that it needed to sink into the crevices (i.e. the grout), because it would be a more porous surface than the brownstone and would be more likely to retain grunge and moisture. I simply exported a mask from Photoshop for the bricks and grout (this ended up being slightly different from the bump map), and mapped it into my grunge shaders to that it would allow the grout's grunge to be bolder. It's a very subtle effect but I'm very happy with it.

I anticipate finishing all of the shading by the end of this week, and will be able to render the exterior shots very shortly after.