Modelling: Applying Textures

As I have finished my model, it's time for me to find or create textures for each part and apply them to my structure. I started with the wooden crossbeams around the bottom of the lighthouse. I couldn't actually find a texture which I liked the look of, so I decided to create my own in photoshop. After some research, I managed to find a tutorial on how to do this.
So, to create my wood texture, I opened a new photoshop file at 800x800 pixels and selected my foreground and background colours as a light and dark brown. Next, I used the fibres tool under Filter>Render and set the strength and variance to where I thought looked best, this was around variance - 16 and strength - 4. After this I decided to stretch out the texture through image>image size and made the height 2x the width. I created two different wood textures, one lighter than the other, so that I could use one for the wooden beams and window/door frames, and the other for the door.
Below shows the process I used to create the texture and 4 that I created to try different colours and strengths.

For the majority of the other parts to my structure, I had already found various textures on the internet and edited them slightly so that they were the way I wanted them to be, this includes three different brick textures and one for concrete. I have also already created the glass within Maya itself.

As I hadn't modified most of the shapes that I used when modelling much, most of the textures were simple and easy to apply and were seamless without me needing to alter any of the UV maps, but, the stairs were very different, as they were initially a cube, and I also wanted to apply two different textures to them. I began by cutting up the UV's within the editor by selecting each of the edges holding the sides of the object to the middle part (As I wanted the sides to be a different texture to the middle, and then, within the UV editor, I used shift+right click and selected cut UV's. Next, I created a planar map for each of the separate parts, and unfolded them within the UV Editor. I then saved a UV snapshot so that I could form the textures around the UV's in the correct places in Photoshop.

The last two textures I needed were metal, for the hand rails, and a glass sort of texture for the light.
For the metal texture, I wanted to have it shown that the handrails were old and worn. To do this, I created a normal map in Photoshop.





To create a normal map, I firstly made a fully grey layer in a new file, then used filter>noise>add noise and then used filter>3D>generate bump map and adjusted the sliders to create the initial bumpy look for how I wanted the railings to look, lastly, I used filter>3D>generate normal map to create the final image that I would be using. To assign this texture to my object in maya, I created a new blinn material and simply selected the file under the bump mapping option.





Finally, to create the texture for the light at the top of my lighthouse, I unfolded the UV's and took the snapshot into Photoshop and painted over it to show what it would become. When applying this texture I created a new blinn material using the glass preset available using mentalray, so that it would become shiny and slightly transparent like a bulb.





Below is what my model looks like in Maya with all of the textures added in.