Adding detail and depth with just textures

Hello everybody, I’m Samantha Burke, an artist working on Iconoclast! I’m back again with another devlog, this time showing you how you can add depth and detail to your model just by using textures!

Pictured here is a model of a throne that consists of 386 polygons and a simple wood texture applied to most of it. Right now it seems pretty flat and boring, but with some simple additions to the textures we can make this look much more interesting! Let’s add some darker color to the edges of the model as well as some variation in the roughness. Then add some dirt, dust and a few stains to the wood. 

With all of that added to the model the textures feel much less plain! However, the textures still feel a bit flat. While the textures do have wood grain on them, they don’t have the depth that wood grain has. Trying to model in all the small details of the wood would not only be way too time consuming, but also make the polygon count too high to be used in game.

So how do we solve this problem? With the use of normal maps! Normal maps are a type of texture just like roughness, color, and metallic maps that can add artificial depth to a model without increasing the polygon count!

Now with the normal maps added, you can see that the wood texture has much more depth to it! But these wood grains are pretty tiny details. What if we want to do something more extreme, like have carved patterns in the wood, can normal maps do something like that?

Absolutely! By just using normal maps and a bit of color, intricate patterns can be carved into wood without ever having to add a single extra polygon to our model! We can even add things like gemstones popping out of the wood.

With all of these textures combined together, our final result is an incredibly detailed model with depth with only 386 polygons!