This is a Civil-War Era barn for the Civil War time period in Darkest of Days. These are in-game screenshots, with the barn arranged as it would look in an environment, decorated with props and using in-engine post effects. Poly count is just under 10k, with small latches and details at the player’s eye level. Many of these were eventually taken out to bring the count closer to 6k (if I remember right).
Every texture used for the barn was photographed by me after scouting trips to find texture reference. The barn interior textures were taken from a very old and decaying barn on the outskirts of town.
The original texture resolution for everything is 2048. One of our programmers was strict on using as few draw calls as possible, so I put all the barn’s textures onto one map.
Here are some captures of my texturing workflow in Photoshop. The composite image consists of dynamically-linked PSDs and a couple adjustment layers. When I want to edit a particular section, I just double-click on the layer and once I save my changes, it’s updated in the composite. Each section is its own PSD, which consists of the photo source with adjustment layers that are masked off. It’s all non-destructive, so changes can be made very easily without ruining color precision. Adjustment layers are great for tweaking to get just the right values/colors.
These are radiosity renders to test lighting distribution, and for research. I wanted to try adding a radiosity-only texture back on in a post process. To do this, I would bake only the indirect illumination to a map, and then it would be added back on in a shader. Unfortunately, I was not able to take this further.
Photo reference, since this is based on an actual barn. Our investors/producers were against concept art, so we did the next best thing we could think of: use photo reference. Thankfully, I was able to track down the owner via e-mail, who gave me more details on what the barn was like.