Stylised textures

So the "attractive" part of my responsive project was meant to be texturing; I had intended to have a simple and low poly environment that could potentially be used in a 2D camera as a sidescrolling with having an extra 3D/free camera angle when it came to exploring and item searching.

The hanging sign is the fist object that I completely finished:

This is just a screen capture, but I worked on the painted texture, a specular map to give it a shiny texture where needed and a normal map for the bumps.

The chains where quite tricky to get them look like actual geometry when they're just two plains, but I thing that by exagerating their normal map it worked out quite well.

For the normal maps I used Quixel's software called nDo2. It works as a plug in for photoshop and it's pretty easy to use. The idea is that once you have a texture you can convert it into normal maps by the click of a button, instead of going all the way of having a low and high poly mesh and bake it. Probably it's not as precise and it does have better results when you work with photographic textures rather than hand painted ones, but it sure makes life a lot easier, specially with features like live 3d preview, live sculpting, presets and a good panel control to adjust all levels of the normal map.

I'm aware that it can make specular , height, diffuse and other maps, but at least in specular maps I think I prefer to work on them on my own. I found this video on youtube that can show you an understanding and importance of a good specular map. It does come a lot harder when you are working with hand painted assets as you have to create everything from scratch. 

I've also been working on other assets like this fountain below. My main problem at the moment is the time put a dedicated amount of time on each asset as it drains a lot of time by doing so. I thought for my submission I could just focus on having as many assets as possible but with good finishing quality rather than having many unfinished. I'll aim to have a house finish, but I can't certainly assure this at this point.