Coming up short on Hard Mode

After last post, I sat down and tried to decide what I wanted to do this weekend for my game.  I knew it would involve 3D modeling but I was not sure what to do knowing it would be a shorter weekend than I am accustomed to since I am posting Sunday night not Monday night.  I could have finished off the ranch-style house model, which just involved making two more windows and two more doors, more or less.  This would have went together in a few hours and then could be placed on the "To Texture" list.  My other option, which was significantly harder in comparison, was to finish getting comfortable with the texturing process and try my hand at it.  This is what I went with, and I did not get as far as I was hoping.

So for most of the night after posting I sat and watched video after video on how to lay out UVs, how to lay the base coat, how to add details and shading, how to make a bump and a spec map, and some small lighting effects.  By the time I was through I felt fairly confident in the process, since it was no different than the one I laid out in the previous post.  Then I went to put into practice all that I had just learned and picked up an interesting bit of knowledge: the way I model is great for the modeling end but pretty bad for texturing.  My basic modeling strategy is to block out the house in small panels, and then mold the panel into whatever it needs to be, a window, a blank wall, a window, or whatever else is needed.  This makes the work flow real quick since each panel can be manipulated freely or deleted and another copied in its place.  This is very bad for texturing.  The basic idea I took out of all of those tutorials was that you want to keep items with differing materials apart since the space in the color map is very tight and one pixel may straddle something you want brick and another you want wood and make one or the other look off.  What this meant was that while laying out my UV-map, I redid most of the background wall, which did drop the total polygon count from 4860 to under 4500.

It took me most of Saturday to get all of the UVs where I wanted them, and then after starting to lay the base coat of color, I found myself redoing some of the model which was not quite the right proportions.  Unfortunately I did not finish the base coating, which was my "quota" so to speak to post it.  Right now a bunch looks white which detracts from a lot of the rest which I finished.  So my goal is, depending on how life plays out over the next week, to post the finished ranch-style house Friday and the textured row-house, though not necessarily finished textured, for next Sunday.  Until then,
~gunnah