Jade Empire - Reflections

Jade Empire texture URL list:

http://slodive.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/gold-textures/gold-platter.jpg
http://www.getcliparts.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/wood_texture2.jpg
http://ftextures.com/textures/Red-painted-wall-texture.jpg
http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/sites/default/files/album_images/43909-large.jpg
http://www.deviantart.com/download/157051967/Cream_Texture_by_Artbox_DA.jpg
http://www.pixelscrapper.com/sites/default/files/assets/user-1/node-547/image/marisa-lerin-solid-red-paper-asset.jpg
http://www.armoredfloors.com/ArmoredFloors/images/tiles/stone/Brown-Stone.gif
http://www.fremantlestone.com.au/cache/path/:upload:pages:colours:greystone.jpg/width/960/height/800/name/greystone.jpg

Basic door diagram. Sans a lot of the extra stuff I added in in 3D:

While I originally wanted to keep the design very minimalistic and not attempt to tackle the challenge of creating the roof of the house, the door alone did not quite get across the feel I wanted to portray with my model.

When creating my model, I kept a lot of the pieces very separate, as I only held a rough idea of what I wanted the final model to look like in my head and wanted the freedom to change parts as needed. Initially, I laid out the general shape of the building I wanted to make, using very basic shapes to do so.

I spent some time mapping out the sorts of patterns I wanted to place upon my model in 3D as I found it easier to construct them that way; despite knowing I would eventually replace them with opacity mapped planes.

Originally, I wanted to place the last pattern within the door frames. The start of this can be seen in one of the pictures below. However, I found that doing so would make the actual door too indistinct in comparison when next to the side frames of the building. Eventually, I used the above pattern within the windows of the side frames.

In the above picture, the circle was meant to contain a Chinese symbol. With the redesign of the doors that came later, I moved these symbols onto the actual door. After showing my model to a few friends, I was told that while the model looked good, it did not necessarily look oriental. With this taken into consideration, I added in the roof I did not originally plan on including and also placed a couple of (floating!) Chinese lanterns. The door also underwent a redesign to appear more like the doors featured in earlier blog posts and to make it stand out a little more against the side panels.

When it came to lighting, I wanted to recreate the colour and mood of Tien's Landing in the original Jade Empire game -- seen below.

After some tweaking, I established the basic colours, though there were problems with the light positions causing unexpected shadows.

I also began to map out the desired colours for objects in my head, opting to go with a scheme similar to Tien's Landing, again. Reds, blues, greens and golds were selected primarily. Most of my textures were made with basic textures found on the internet that I then tweaked, adjusted and laid over other colours. The main exception to this is the piece of wood above the doorway; this was made almost completely from scratch with a wooden texture laid underneath.

Some textures had less time spent on them; I knew many would not get as much attention/had parts out of view. I also neglected to texture the roof, as it wasn't part of the original design and a little too complex. As a final touch to add a little more ambience, I put glowing spheres within the lantern to give the impression that they were lit up.

Improvements I'd like to make:

Bump mapping.
Tweaking on the opacity maps in the windows - perhaps adding lighting as though the building lights are on.
More detail on the textures I devoted less time to.
Further clean up on the roof.
Completing the roof/sides (both models and textures).
Adding a little complexity to the lighting.
Adding string to the lanterns so they're no longer floating in space.

Bonus HD Render!