Environment Development - Creating Assets

As provided to use by the university we our modelling program is Autodesk Maya but to complete the whole process of creating an asset I also required Adobe Photoshop and a great tool called CrazyBump.

With the image in my mind I knew a simple crate would be an obvious model in my game so that's where I started.

Nothing special, a simple extrude and another extrude to intent the model. Giving it the typical 'crate' look. Next was the UV mapping, being a simple model I could rely on the Automatic UV Mapping tool to unwrap the model and then I textured it.

The texture has been modified from a simple piece of wood texture I found, using Photoshop I had to use 'Content Aware Scale' to help with fitting the pieces in, overall it came out well. I used a few inner glows just to really separate the parts and emphasise each one.

Using the awesome CrazyBump program I was able to quickly create and normal and occlusion map for my wooden crate texture, a few tweaks with the intensity and sharpness and a going back and forth between CrazyBump and Maya I had found the right settings.

Finally I applied all the textures and this is what I came out with in the Maya previewer, happy with the result I decided to use this crate in my upcoming game environment.