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Creating the texture for fairy tale 3d book

Aug 10, 2020
Creating the texture for fairy tale 3d book

My name is Maya Grishanowitch. An aspiring concept artist and illustrator, keen on the obscure fairy tales no one remembers anymore. Lives with a pet hedgehog and strongly suspects that he is a cursed knight. Here is my story about creating the texture for 3d book.

Advantage of creating textures 

– An optimal texture size and resolution; 

– Copyright. According to Alice, there is no use of a book without pictures. The illustration inside the book is by Arthur Hughes; 

– Nothing demonstrates the amount of details as accurate as a real object, if a realistic texture is a goal. For example, a painted flyleaf is often overlooked, while in our case it adds elegance and character to the creating texture. 

Creating the texture
Raw references for the inner parts. Illustration of Arthur Hughes

What makes a book 

The texture of our future 3d book consist of the following elements: 

  • A leather cover 
  • A leather binding 
  • A golden rim 
  • Golden paper edges 
  • A blank paper 
  • An initial letter 
  • A book title 
  • An illustration 
  • A dummy text 

In the end, the elements from 1 to 5 were taken from one actual book. Each element required one or two photos. The elements from 5 to 8 had to have a “personal” book to be found for each one of them. 

Creating the texture
Raw references for the cover

Creating texture process

During a texturing process we need to consider two aspects.

Firstly, a technical one. Before an actual working on a specific texture as a whole, each material has to be adjusted separately. It is crucial to get rid of a perspective distortion in a reference photograph. Moreover, it is necessary to remove contrasted shadows and light spots via High Pass filter. As long as only I require a diffuse texture, I preserved most of the highlights on the golden parts, while a blank paper parts I had corrected. Also, I avoided an evident pattern repetition in a same material, as on left vs right side of the leather cover. 

The adjusted texture, ready for work

Secondly, an artistic one. Finding and photographing suitable references is undoubtedly important. Regrettably, I lacked monolights for a proper lightning. No less important is to make different parts of a texture fit each other, even when all of them I obtained from a same, actual object. In our case, the flyleaf, the leather parts and the paper were from one book and naturally looked well together in reality. However, during working process, a color of the flyleaf I shifted towards a warmer palette. So it would not appear excessive and distract viewer’s attention from the inner parts of the book. Furthermore, the inner parts, mentioned above, I supplied from different sources. Then I brought to an organic whole by changing color and contrast.

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