Snowspeeder texturing

Snowspeeder texture

The texturing of the snowspeeder was an important process to get right. The abstract shape combined with the block colours gave a strange appearance that certainly needed detail. After playing about with different effects, the Lynda tutorial on adding bump maps seemed the best approach to adding more detail to something that is mainly one colour.

 
1) The main body started out as a near white solid colour. Playing around with the settings of a noise procedural map gave me the idea of adding a slightly brighter colour to give it the effect that it is both worn from and covered in snow. The fractal specs are set to the default size of 25 which appears to give a good covering without going unnoticed. 

2) Noticing the orange panels stuck a bit too much as a solid colour, I experimented with the idea of adding a noise map to this material. The effect I was going for was again a combination of wear and tear and snow covered. Using the relatively large size of 25 and having it cover a larger area produced a good result, as though the panel was cut out of a much larger snow covered block. Having the specs smaller would not have worked as well because of this.
 
3) The metal texture here is the one used on R2D2. The reflection is perhaps most impressive on this model as it catches the cockpit and gun very nicely. I have also added a slight snowy/worn effect over the metal as the diffuse channel was still open. This was important as the metal looked far too polished and undamaged unlike the rest of the model without it.

4) In much the same way as R2D2 - showing the benefit of working on a similar model first to save time finding materials - the glass textures worked well with architectural metal preset. As both don't really require any transparency and the reflection as shown above is still achieved, this seems the most time effective solution for the windows

Good parts:

• Otherwise simple colours are made much more interesting with subtle effect of noise map
• High quality metal texture achieved through reflection and specular highlights
• Orange panels work well with the scene and context of the model

Improvements:

• Despite the effective material, the low poly gun's faces are still very obvious. This isn't so much of an issue from far away and there are few shots that will be that close to the gun
• Grills on gun supports still look incredibly shiny even with snow over them and would benefit from being duller