THE TEXTURES OF BIG BUCK BUNNY

We had three different kinds of textures for "Big Buck Bunny":

- the "characters" textures, painted by Andy Goralczyk, who also set and combed the fur and feather particle system for all of them;
- the "environment" textures, painted, and in some case sculpted, by Enrico Valenza, who also painted all the matte paintings for clouds, forest and hills (plus some element, as for example, mushrooms and plants, textured with procedurals);
- the "props" textures, mainly made with procedurals and, in some case, baked to UV maps.

All the image textures and the matte paintings have been painted mainly in "The Gimp", but some texture also in "Krita" (Krita has awesome brushes, yes!).

Normal maps for the trees

The first goal was to try to obtain a good "tridimensional" effect for the barks of all the different trees, trying to keep at the same time the toony style of the sketches. So it had to be a stylized kind of bark matching the toy-like shape of the trees.

Bump maps weren't enough to give a good level of detailing, so we went for normal maps. One approach could have been to sculpt directly the entire tree model and then bake the normals on unwrapped uv coordinates, but this way we would have had very big textures for each tree model, and we knew that we were going to have several closeups of the trees but also a lot of them in the forest...

The solution was to sculpt just a section of the bark for each tree and then tile it. Different types of bark have been sculpted on planes with a 10 level multires applied; then we baked the normals on a simple plan and saved the image.

Each bark normal texture has been made tileable in Gimp, both by the "Make Seamless" filter and the "Clone Tool". Then all the trees trunks have been unwrapped as best as possible and the normal maps applied to check the effect.
In some case it has been enough to divide the unvrapping in sections accordingly to pre-existing seams in the mesh topology; in other cases the unwrapping had to be more organic to prevent for visible seams in the texturing.

Then, color maps have been made using the normal maps as a starting point, again by loading them in Gimp and, by painting colors on several layers, trying to obtain a "painterly" look.

In the end, several kinds of barks have been obtained by mixing togheter two or three different different normal maps in different ways, and also some very subtle procedural texture has been used to improve the final result.