Progressing further with camera mapping within Maya, I wanted to create a more complex image that would enable me to learn more about texturing my camera map, utilising photshop.

Aims

• Further develop my camera mapping skills
• Utilise photoshop to edit the image for more complex textures on my map
• Create my own textures to replace blank faces

Looking around 0n YouTube I managed to find a video that goes into great detail on the process of texturing camera maps, as well as how to replace faces with have no detail from the original image, a lot of this video deals with how to ues photoshop within the mapping workflow as well as the hypershade within Maya.

Before I started to model my scene in Maya, I first took my image and imported it into photoshop, with the intent of editing it so there would be minimal stretching on the front of the map when moving the camera from the initial projection. I achieved this by utilising the clone stamp & patch tools in photoshop. The front of the house in mym image was obscured by grass sitting in front of it, which had to be removed, otherwise would cause bad stretching when it came to mapping out the image. Below you can see the before and after of the original image and my edit.

Before Editing

After Editing

Moving onto the actual camera map, I first followed similar steps as my first experiment in camera mapping, I created my projection camera and matched its settings to the image using the exif data contained within it, after I had placed my editing image onto the image plane, I then moved the grid to align with the floor of the image and began to create the geometry for the scene. Most of the geometry was relatively simple to create, the only complex part to this was getting the windows to look right, I ended up creating some edge loops on my house model for the bottom and top lip of the windows, then using the multi-cut tool to get some edge for the sides, once this was completed I removed any intersecting edges on the windows, selected the faces and extruded the inwards.

Then going into the hypershade, I was ready to apply the projection onto my model, this involved playinng around with the settings of the nodes and linking my image into the projection node, turning the diffuse down and the ambient light all the way up enabled the image to be the lighting for my scene.

Following along with the video, I attempted to replace the sky in my scene, the way this would be accomplished was to take a sphere in Maya, cut it in half and reverse the faces to face inwards and then taking my replacement skybox and projecting it onto the sphere using a cylindrical projection, after messing around with the settings of the projection I got a nice looking sky replacement, sadly as I found out either my machine or my version of Maya really did not like this and repeatedly crashed whenever I tried to project my image onto the sphere, I did some googling to see if any others had this same problem but I assume because it’s quite an obscure problem I could not find anything, after a few tries I decided to move onto the next section of this experiment.

I was now ready to start replacing some of the textures within my scene, because camera maps can only work well with geometry within the projection view, anything outisde this view is stretched and looks quite ugly, making it difficult when moving a render camera around the scene. To remedy this I had to bake out the textures on some of my geometry, then taking the baked texture into photoshop, editing it using the clone stamp & patch tools, saving it and reloading the image node within the hypershade.

My baked out floor texture before edit

After Editing

Next I moved onto replacing the texture on the side of the building which could not be seen on the original image, because of this the process was quite different, first I created a camera facing the side of the house, rendered out an image and then imported it into photoshop, then I replaced the stretched projection with a concrete texture I found online by creating a selection around the alpha of the image, placing the new texture over the selection and creating a mask over it, as well as using a color overlay layer to match the color of the texture to the rest of my scene.

Before Editing

After Editing

I then exported this image out of photoshop and applied it to the camera facing the side of  the house using another projection node, I then selected the faces which I wanted to replace the texture of and applied my material. It definitely didn’t look seamless, but this was a useful exercise in how to accomplish replacing textures on my camera map.

Once I was comfortable with this method I decided that I would attempt to replace the roof of my scene with a cleaner texture.

Roof before Edit

After edit in Maya

In reflection, I’m very happy with this experiment, the map itself is quite messy and definitely would not be suitable as a final shot, but for the methods learned in replacing textures on my camera map, as well as techniques learned in photoshop it was quite a success, where I currently stand with camera mapping makes me very confident for my final output in this section. Moving forward, for my next scene I definitely intend on making the geometry of my scene much cleaner, for this scene it involved a lot of moving vertices in odd ways, causing some of them to insersect eachother and just looking overall quite ugly. Another point of improvement would be to ensure that the textures I use to replace the default map should match and integrate into the scene more, the roof looks okay but the side of the building is off in terms of color, to remedy this I should experiment more in photoshop as well as consider other methods of texture replacement.

What I learned

• How to effectively replace the textures of my camera map
• Improved my skills in photoshop
• How to bake out my textures and tie them to photoshop

What I need to Improve

• Make cleaner geometry for my scene
• Integrating my replacement textures better through color grading

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