Faking Shadows
Throughout the cave area i faked shadows and grimey areas by brushing them on in Photoshop on a new layer that is on top of the actual texture. The main reasons for this are...
1) These areas are easily amendable so the shaded areas can become darker or greater.
2) It goes well with the 3DS Max lighting system.
3) It will save greatly on rendering time as the shading from the lights ddoess not have to be calculated as much.
A simple showcase of this is below where i have shaded a wall next to a staircase. The next image is of the texture map of the wall.
1) These areas are easily amendable so the shaded areas can become darker or greater.
2) It goes well with the 3DS Max lighting system.
3) It will save greatly on rendering time as the shading from the lights ddoess not have to be calculated as much.
A simple showcase of this is below where i have shaded a wall next to a staircase. The next image is of the texture map of the wall.
Looking on the left hand side we can see that the stairs have shaded areas but not the wall. So to create the darkened area we move back to Photoshop.
The added shade can be seen on the texture below, just using a darkened black brush set at a low opacity setting shadows can be layered up so that they are not too harsh and just basic black.
The render below shows the shaded areas completion and effect it has on the scene, this looks far better than the one previous. This method was good to use especially when 'stitching' various parts of the cave together when it was initially created.
