Asset farming

 A break for terrains. Actually learning something useful, thanks in large part to the environmental design course.

Key lessons:

• You can do a lot using the Project from View UV Unwrap. Piotr is maybe the fourth artists who said they use it for about 90% of their work. This could be a concept artist's approach-"move quickly and don't quite build things properly"-but it's working for now.
• Procedural textures have a lot going for them: driving variation with seed values and being able to tweak parameters. Low memory cost (at the expense of other resources, especially with lots of complex node trees. However, they really don't tell the kind of stories that real-world photo sources can capture. 
• Use the UV editor to find interesting alignments with source images that are not even remotely seamless. Seamless textures are critical in the long run, but for fleshing out the materials of an environment, it's all about the character of surfaces.

So I started with some base artefacts.

First Asset: Small concrete barriers; so-called "cement sentries"

The texture maps are home-grown. I then realised that for PBR I'd need to generate some supporting maps using Materialise, but it stopped working because of missing framework components.

I recalled that there was an addon that automatically generated the required maps from a target colour map. It's pretty cheap, too. 

Pbr Texture & Material Generator For Blender

What's nice is this tool is very intuitive, once you realise that materials you "create" are all in memory until you save the maps out and turn them into an asset. My materials were disappearing because I mistakenly thought that "what the monkey sees, money keeps".

Its documentation is minimal, but this is one of those cases where keeping things simple allows users to install and use with minimal head scratching.

To be clear, this isn't a one-click-and-done solution. All the default materials have excessive specularity, so my concrete blocks appear too slick and shiny. However, the adjustment parameters are available to make the necessary adjustments.

Next asset: A modular wall section

Something a bit bigger

Something modular

Next up: Continued training from Piotr's Environmental Design course