Creating, Texturing and Rendering a Wine Bottle & Box: Layering Texture Tags

Photo of Raymond Olsen

Instructor Raymond Olsen

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  • Duration: 11:32
  • Views: 3594
  • Made with Release: 19
  • Works with Release: 19 and greater

Using more than one material and texture projection on a single object using layered texture tags and alpha channels.

We’ll begin by creating two PBR materials to use for the wine box. Next we’ll layer the texture tags on the box top and use a flat projection to place the logo wordmark material. Then we’ll use an alpha channel gradient in the logo material to reveal the cardboard material under it. After that we’ll reveal the 1 page layer in the object manager and duplicate the floor and light planes. We’ll rename the duplicates and assign them to the two page layer for use in this installment. We’ll hide the 1 page layer once again and quickly set up our 2 page composition by tweaking the floor and light planes. We’ll finish the video with the creation of the 2 page camera.

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Transcript

In this video, we'll be texturing the wine box with two different materials. One will be a simple cardboard material, and the other material will be the orange stripe with the brand word mark in it. We'll combine the two materials using layered texture tags in an alpha channel. After that, we'll copy the floor and light planes from our one-page layer, and use them to quickly set up our two-page lay out. Let's go ahead and save an increment of our file. Takes me up to V3 of the new naming convention. I'm going to de-select everything, and let's go ahead and start creating our materials. I'm going to create a new PBR material. I'm going to rename this material "Box Cardboard." And in the Reflectance channel, let's change that layer color to a black. So, I'm just going to use the value slider in the HSV section, and I'm going to bring it back down to around 10. So, it's not pure black, but that will give us a nice black to work with. And now, we need to assign that material to the bottom and the top. There are several ways to do this, but I want to show you how to do it with the Assign tab in the material. So right over here in Assign, you can actually drag your objects right into here. So, I just drag the bottom and the top objects, and now that material has been assigned to them. So next, we want to create the material that's going to layer on top of that and add the stripe with the logo word mark on it. So, let's go ahead and create another PBR material. This one, I'm going to name "Box Stripe." And once again, in the Reflectance channel, we need to change the layer color of the diffuse layer. But I'm going to use a texture this time in the texture slot, so just click that button. And we're going to use Wine Box Stripe. I keep that in the footage folder of my project. I'm going to say No because I organize my textures a little bit differently. And now we're ready to dump this onto the box top. So, I'm going to click and drag right up to the Object Manager this time, and now this object has two texture tags. I'm going to go and drag the box cardboard tag over so they're right next to each other. And this is a layer system, so the right texture tag is the top of the stack, and it goes down the stack on your way to the left. So, top, bottom. And right now, this is set to UVW mapping, but I want to be able to position this myself. So, I'm going to change this to flat. And now, you can see it's all wonky but we can fix all that. So first, I want to increase the resolution of this texture so it's easier to see. So, I'm going to activate the box stripe material, come over to Editor, and the texture preview size is what we need to change. I'm just going to change it to No Scaling, and that'll give us the original resolution of our texture, which is nice and crisp. So now, we need to realign this flat projection. So, I'm going to select the texture tag, activate my Texture and Axis tools, and then select the top object that that tag is assigned to. And now you can see, there's our texture envelope signified by the grid. So, I'm going to rotate this 90 degrees, so it's shooting the texture flat down from the top. And then, I'm going to scale this down. You can see we're getting multiple copies, and that's because our Tile is on. So, I'm going to go and turn off tiling in the texture tag. Now you can see, we're just getting the one copy of our texture. And now, I'm going to rotate this into place, 180 degrees, and slide this down to the bottom. So now, we're in place, but you can see our stripe is way too large. We're looking for something more like this. And I could have done this with a texture, but I prefer to do it with a gradient in our alpha channel. So, I just double-click the texture tag. One click will activate the texture tag, double-clicking will dump you into the material down here in the Attribute Manager. So that's how I got here this time. So, in the Basic tab, we can turn on the Alpha channel. And in the Alpha channel, we're going to drop a gradient, just like we did in the neck wrap of the bottle texturing tutorial. I'm going to jump into the gradient, and I'm going to change the type down here to 2D UV. And again, I'm going to turn our knot interpolation to none. So now, it's just going to go straight color to color. I'm going to move the white, which will be the opaque part of the alpha. And then, I'm going to click anywhere in the black to make a new black knot and move that over here to the top. And now, we can interactively size our stripe. And again, you can totally do this with a material or with a texture and just dump that in here instead of the gradient. But with a gradient, you have complete control over the width of your stripe. And it just gives you a little bit of wiggle room for design purposes. And it's super fast, so I do this a lot using gradients. So, we're done with that. So I'm going to turn off the Texture tool, go back to Model mode, turn off the Axis tool, and our box is good to go. We'll come back in and fine tune everything later. But now, let's go ahead and make, or copy, rather, our floor and our lighting from our one-page layer. Instead of creating from scratch, we can just come over here to the layers palette or the Layer Manager, turn on Visibility and Manager on our one-page layer, and here's everything we left behind. I would like the light plane left, the light plane right, and the floor, I would just like to make a copy of those, because I want to leave these as they are. We took time to fine tune those. I don't want to screw it up. So, I'm just going to Ctrl+drag a copy, and then I'm going to drag those new copies to our two-page layer. You can see the layer swatch updated. And now, we can just turn our one-page layer back off. So now, we've got individual copies for our two-page layer that are not going to affect the original layout from the one- page layer. But you can see, it added a .1 to the suffix of all of our object names. I don't really like that. I like to keep everything named accordingly, so I want to show you another great tool. Up here in Tools, there's a naming tool. And you need to activate the Attribute Manager to see it. And I want to replace this .1 that gets added by default, with _twopage. I just hit Replace Name, it replaces all of my names for me. That's a great tool especially if you're renaming lots of objects. Now, everything makes sense, everything is assigned to the two-page layer and named appropriately. So, the next step is going to be setting up our new camera angle. So, I'm just going to orbit, navigate into place. I'll show you the final once again. We're just looking for something like this with the box's offset in a nice pattern. Now, it's time to grab the top of the box, activate the Move tool with E, and just offset this a bit. I'm going to come into the four view, I'm going to turn this viewport back to the top view. Zoom in a bit. And that way, I can just rotate this right into place. You can see the floor's intersecting with the bottom of our wine box, so I guess my calculations were a little bit off when we moved that up in Y. So, I'm just going to grab the wine box parent, maximize the front view, and we're just going to eyeball that into place. I'm going to undo that, and I'm going to bring our wine bottle instance with that. So, I'm going to Ctrl+click that to select it as well, eyeball those into place, and that looks pretty good. It's no longer intersecting the bottom of our wine box. Come back to the foreview, and let's grab this right light plane using the Object Manager. I'm just going to get that out of the frame. It'll still be contributing light to the right side of the scene, but we don't need to see it. You can see our floor needs to be moved up. And we're pretty close. Let's take one more look at the final. And after much experimentation, I found that the lighting that I preferred was kind of an overhead light pushed towards the top of the wine box, and that gave me a nice illumination throughout the scene and it casted some nice shadows down here on the bottom. So to do that, I'm going to take our left light plane and resize and reposition it. But before I do that, I want to save our camera angle. So, let's create a new camera using this camera angle, and that's done by simply clicking the camera button. We just made a new camera, if we look through it. This is our camera angle, so I'm going to stop looking through it. So, we've saved our layout. I'm going to rename it "Two Page Camera." And now, we can continue to work in this perspective view with our camera being saved. So, I'm just going to pull out, and let's take this left light plane and turn it into more of a square shape. Now on the top view, I'm going to move it up here. I'm going to rotate it and kind of square it up, something like this. And then, in the side view, I'm going to take this up so it's an overhead light. And I'm going to kind of rotate it so it's shooting the light down from the top of the boxes to the bottom to cast those shadows. Move it back a little. And now, let's go ahead and reactivate our camera so we can see how we're going to be looking when we render. And I'm doing this because we can kind of see where that reflection is going to show up on the floor. So, I'd like it right about here to draw your eye to the center of the frame. I want to make it a little bit bigger and maybe a little bit higher. And that should be close. And like I said, this took me a long time to do, so don't expect your project to go this quickly. But if we turn our IRR on, we can kind of see how the lighting is looking. And that looks pretty good. I think it's a little bit dark, but we can fix that just by scaling up the size of our light plane. You can see it instantly got brighter. And I think I might want to move this down a little bit, move that reflection just a touch to kind of focus more on the branding of the bottles. I think that looks pretty good. So, I'm going to turn off the IRR. I'm going to save my scene, and then I'm going to hit Shift+R to render to picture viewer. I'm going to hit Ctrl+B, just so we can make sure, yes, we're using our two page whip setting, and that was Ctrl+B to bring up Render Settings. And I think that looks pretty good. We'll come back in and fine tune everything later in the series, but that's a pretty good start. So, I'm going to close that out. And you can layer as many of these texture tags as you want on your objects. It's a great way to add detail like that without having to build it all under one texture. Now that our box is open, let's go ahead and make the cardboard insert that will hold the wine bottle in the next video.
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