The main thing I am going to be making textures for in the environments is the boxes. A lot of the rest will be blocked out with colour in the toon shader. I was tempted for a while to leave the environment textures as this toon shaded single blocked out colour, but to have a variety of them. However I was worries the character, with his more detailed texture, would stand out in an odd way. So I thought I'd try out texturing a box in Substance Painter to try and get that painterly style I was interested in, and see how it looked. I ended up really liking this and so decided to mix a few different textured boxes amongst amongst the blocked colour boxes.
I created UV maps for 3 different boxes, these were easy to map in the UV editor as most created a classic box net if you cut the seams right.
For the box mountain scene I didn't think it would work as well to have the different textures mixed in the boxes, there would be to many to go in and individually individually reassign the various textures to each of the visible boxes. There were also complications in doing this within MASH as the instances will copy the exact textures and make it too obviously a repeating pattern.
I also experimented here by trying to supplement the texture with some effects with an Ambient Occlusion tone map mask. This is what s creating the dark grain in the image below.
I didn't go with this in the end as it created too much of a busy, muddy look and with the toon shader lines also applied, this was a bit too much black. Whilst the toon shade lines could be adjusted for this the grain could not. If there was a clear way of doing so I would have possibly kept the effect.
Thoughts on Environment Texturing
This step and seeing some of the final look of the environment come together like this is definitely a step I find very fulfilling. Whilst I was able to texture a few boxes however, due to the style and subject matter I am working with in my project there wasn't much else to design and texture. The plan from the beginning was to try and keep the 3D modelling to a minimum so that I could focus on learning what I needed to complete the film. so I elected to make any other details of the scene to be 2D matte paintings, which I was already familiar with. Although I still believe there wouldn't have been time for this, I do think I would have enjoyed texturing more items. Definitely something I will try again in the future!