Large asset creation, material making and texturing

So far I've kept up with the schedule that I set out for myself however I've had to move a few things around after some feedback from Darren. These include:

- Modelling in the doors and walkway entrance
- Adding a backface to the walls/windows to improve my shadows
     - May lead to re-doing the lighting a little
- Improve on my rug
    - Got some advice to look at the rug example in one of the Unreal maps

Onto my actual progress, the map table itself has finished being modeled but I also wanted to go into how I created the design. Not only did I use the concept as reference I also looked at real-world examples (which there aren't many) to make it look like a real-world object.

I looked at a lot of 18th century drawing tables to see how they would be put together. I combined this with the concept art to create an object that looks like it has a straight forward purpose. I initially couldn't find many objects that looked like the concept so I ended up putting a couple together for the final result. 

The finished model, I tried to keep the overall look quite simple but I created the swirl designs on the side using a spline inside 3DS Max, these added just a nice bit of detail to the design but also break up the blocky-ness. I've added in a sub-divided plane for now for the map itself. The rest of the maps detail will be done using an alpha channel.

I've been trying to get away without doing too much sculpting, not because I don't like it but simply because it can be really time-consuming on such a large number of assets. I've found NDO to be a huge help in the project so far, I found a number of wood carving designs on the internet and manipulated these inside NDO to create some nice carvings which I can include on my normal maps.

You can see the same example here, for the grooves where the wood pieces would meet I created a PSD full of different shapes created using NDO, I can then use these where ever I want for added detail. I also sneaked in a very faint Assassin's Creed symbol into the wood.

If you've been following my progress you'll notice that I've been creating a lot of my own materials inside DDO itself. I use a mixture of creating my own from scratch and importing them in or completely changing the preset ones. The material above was originally a varnished cherry wood but I adapted it into a very rough and worn wood which will be used throughout my environment.

The current view of the environment as of 16th Jan. Here you can see I've textured a few more assets including the globe table. The table itself was quite hard as I had to get the UVs of the sphere perfect for my map would fit on there with a minimal amount of distortion.

There's also a large amount of wood materials so I'm trying to get them all to fit nicely with each other and not just awkwardly thrown together.