Making Of 'Coffee'

Hello, I'm Roman Samakovsky. In this article I would like to discuss the process of re-texturing my image, "Coffee", especially for 3DTotal.com, using their wonderful library of Total Textures.

First of all, please take a look at the geometry that I was working with for the texturing (Fig.01). 

Fig.

Texturing

Quite often, choosing a texture is a very challenging task, so I often use the Internet to help me. Internet textures are very difficult to work with, especially if we want to print out our images. As we all know, printing normally requires large rendered image sizes, and unfortunately Internet textures are often small and this can clearly be seen in the final image. With this in mind, the Total Textures collection is very convenient for a project like this, because all the textures are of good sizes, sufficient for rendering big images.

The First Step: The Table

Normally I start with texturing the largest objects first, so I'll do the same here and begin by creating a material for the table. First, take a look at Fig.02. Here you can see the various materials which were created without using any textures - glass, chrome, steam, sugar, coffee, etc. I also used some of my own specific textures, in addition to those from the Total Textures collection.

Fig.

So I started with the material for the table. This time round, I wanted to make the colour a little darker and I found a suitable texture on the album, Total Textures: Volume 12 - Textures from Around the World (Part 1). I decided to add some stains, but with a slightly paler wood, to the texture. You can see how I achieved the wood material in Fig.2a. I never ignore Bumpchannel; I believe it is a very important parameter in order to achieve a natural look of a material. I applied a monochrome image of the texture to this channel, and then added a few paler spots. For this, I used the Mix map and one of the suitable textures from the album Total Textures: Volume 5 - Dirt & Graffiti. Here's how the wood of the table looks in the Material Editor (Fig.03).

Fig. 02a

Fig. 03

The Straw Mat

I used the Displacement tool to create the geometry for the mat. These are the textures I used (Fig.04). I experimented with displacing the base colour for a while, but each time the result was different from what I expected. So I eventually decided to use the original colour of the material, after adding a few coffee stains.

Fig. 04

Fig.04a shows the basic material of a straw mat. The Opacitychannel is very important as it gives the material its pattern.  The Displacement tool defines the surface relief, which is why the Bumpchannel is not significant here. I then added coffee stains.

Fig.04a

As you can see from Fig.05, I used Blend tool. The technique is quite simple: Material 1 is the original mat texture with no editing; Material 2 is the same texture, but slightly tinted to imitate a darkened surface. One of the textures from Total Textures: Volume 5 - Dirt & Graffiti was used as a mask.

Fig. 05

The Coffee Grinder

I also wanted to add some variety to this material, rather than use a simple texture. Again, I used the Mix map. For mixing, I used a texture from the album, Total Textures: Volume 5 - Dirt & Graffiti. Since this material needed to imitate a varnished coating, I didn't really use the Bumpchannel a lot. The patches of sunlight were done in the usual way for V-Ray rendering; Fig.06 shows the final texture.

Fig. 06

The Coffee Pot

I didn't use any specific techniques to create the handle - the coffee pot itself seemed to be a more challenging and exciting task. I wanted to show black dust in its lower part and some coffee stains. I tried to do this with the help of Multi/sub-object. I divided the object into a few identified layers in order to add various materials. Moreover, for each sub-material I used Blend because I needed to see different textures of stains and dirtiness on all of the layers. The material and its structure can be seen Fig.07.

Fig. 07

The final image of the work can be seen in Fig.08. I hope this article is somehow useful for you. Thanks goes to the 3DTotal team for offering me the opportunity to re-texture this image using the Total Textures collection. Thanks to all and best wishes!

Fig. 08