Lookout Tower Tutorial Part 4 By Bram van Gerwen
Tutorial
Welcome to the last part of the Lookout Tower Tutorial, Part 4. In this tutorial we are going to do some basic texturing on the tower and show some different ways to combine and mix textures. Textures needed in this tutorial can be found in the Tex folder inside the TowerPart4Finished folder. Open the TowerPart4Start.c4d file. We'll begin by texturing a bit of the main tower body. So select the tower body, switch to polygon mode and select the Freehand selection tool. Enable 'Tolerant selection' and 'Only select visible elements' and in Top view draw a circle inside the outer loop of the top floor, Picture 1A. The tolerant selection makes sure that the polygons that don't fall entirely in your selection are selected as well.
Now use Grow selection once, then select the Loop selection tool and while holding ctrl deselect the lower and middle loop of the staircase gap and also deselect the vertical ring on the outer edge of the floor, Picture 1B. Click Set Selection
(Selection -> Set Selection) to create a tag that stores the current selection. Click the tag and name it 'top floor'. Create a new material and name it 'Floor Gradient'. Disable the Specular and load a 'Gradient' into the Color Texture field. Click on the Gradient and set the Colors like in Picture 2A and the Type to 2D-V. Now drag the floor gradient to the Tower body object. Click the texture tag that appears behind the object
and move it to the left of the selection tag. Set the Projection to Flat and drag the 'top floor' selection tag to the Selection field in the tag properties. This texture will now be restricted to the selection in that tag. Switch to the Texture Axis Tool. You will now see a outlined cube with therein a flat plane which is a representation of the flat texture projection we set it to. The gradient will be projected across this plane so we need to move the texture up and scale its Y-axis down to get the gradient effect on the stones of the top floor. Set the Y position of the texture to 252.95 and the Y scale to 0.6 and apply. These values are very precise as the stones are only a couple of increments high and as you see the miniscule height of the texture puts the gradient nicely from the floor to the top of the stones, the darker grey outlines the stones in a satisfactory manner, Picture 2B. Like this the floor still looks a little flat, we want it to be more realistic.
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This will be accomplished with a bump texture, we can't just add the bump to the floor gradient material as the projection of the texture is not correct to spread the bump over the floor. We'll mix a loose bump material with a different projection together with the already applied gradient texture. Create a new material, name it 'Floor Bump'. Disable the color and specular and enable the bump section. In the Bump channel load Noise into the Texture field, click on the noise and set it to Poxo. Now drag the Floor Bump material to the tower body and move its texture tag right of the gradient tag for clarity. Then drag the top floor selection to its Selection field just like with the gradient texture to restrict it to that selection, set its projection to Flat. Set its Y position to 252, X scale to 200, Y Scale to 200, P rotation to 90 and apply. The bump texture is now laying flat on top of the tower and is roughly the diameter of the tower itself. If you render now you will only see a black floor, to remedy this enable the 'Mix Textures' option inside the texture tag of the bump material. This will mix it with the underlying materials, render again and you will see both materials being mixed in the given selection. The bump still looks a bit rough so we'll tone that down a bit next. Go to the noise channel inside the bump material. Click the noise to see its options again, you'll see that Color 1 & 2 are set to hard black and white. Simply change the black to a dark grey and the white to a light grey to soften the bump. Fiddle with these grey values until the effect is to your liking.
