I felt that the main walls of the manor house were currently looking too low-resolution, so I decided I would create a new texture that could be applied to each wall section separately.
I started the new texture by painting a base colour layer and then adding a photo texture layer from a photo I had taken at Thorpe Hall. I had taken a few pictures of various textures I found on my visits, which I will be using in some of my texture creation although the majority of them will be created with only digital paint brushes. I removed all saturation from the photo first, and also altered the levels so that it had a good balance of light and dark areas which would create the illusion of a rough texture. I set the photo layer mode to multiply and decreased the opacity so that it blends into the colour layer.
On top of that, is the cement layer which I made by first creating solid colour white brick shapes and then inverting the selection and filling the space on a new layer with an off-white solid colour. With that, I could then take a selection of 'bricks' and create an adjustment layer nested to the Base Colour layer to darken/brighten that selection - resulting in a random selection of darker and lighter bricks. This gives a little more realistic variety to the wall of the house.
Next is to give the wall some natural dirt and grime. First I create a 'shadow' layer using the gradient tool at the top and bottom of the wall where you would naturally find more dirt from the ground and from where rain water drips down from the roof. Then there is the Dirt layer, where I use different brushes to give the effect of spots of dirt and also streaks of grime.
Next was the texture for the columns at the front of the house. I used the same techniques as before, except that I used no photo images in this texture. Every part was created using different paint brushes.
After checking how the texture looked when applied to the house model in Maya, I thought it looked a little too dark so I decided to make some alterations to the hue, saturations and lightness in the Photoshop file and reload it. I'm more satisfied with the way it looks now.
