Final image

Above is just my first diffuse study to get the base colours correct.

 Here is an image of my final Piece, unfortunately something went wrong went it came to combining my normal maps and some areas look bad e.g. the gold bit. However with my diffuse/ambiant occlusion I feel it much improved. Adding the specular map has made it better too but may need toning down as the wood comes across too shiny at some angles.

Final Diffuse Map

Looks okay from these three angles if seen on the corner you can see that the wood textures do not match up, due to bad UV design. I feel my ability to paint stylised textures has improved as I went along.

Notchs ( modeled in or baked)

 Above is a notch in the wood that I have baked in  which does not change the silhouette, however does not need to if its going to be placed in an area where you cant see it from an angle.

 Here is a notch that is more on the edge of the Box so does change the silhouette and can be seen from the edge.

High Poly Model To First Bake

 Above is my final high poly model that I then used to create my normal map in x-normal to put in my low poly which is below. Looks awesome (from this distance), looking closer i found minor problems that could be fixed by changing the UV's.

Heres an example of some UV's I detached to get rid of a black line, unfortunately I forgot to take a photo before I fixed it but there was an edge and it was black and looked bad, there was a few of these on the overall model I fixed them in  the same, by changing the vertexes.

Below is the fixed Version, YAY! Looks much better.

Lighting!

 Above shows my complete lack of knowledge when it comes to lighting. I came back to it later after having a talk with Nigel in how I could Improve it. We talked about how the upper edge of the edge would be the lightest and how the sun would have seeped in forming a kind of glow on the underneath of the edge. The edge is shown below, along with the girder which I tried to apply lighting too, using different shades of grey to give it the illusion. By making it more shadowy under the bends in the metal.

UV Mapping (Failure & Success)

Above is the final UV map for the final version of my model, to start with I though I had done well in terms of using up most of the space and getting the parts I wanted large. However it could be much improved! I went over it many a times, separating edges in order to Fix areas within the normal map for baking, so that the dark lines on the edge didn't appear. I learnt how to fix these from George's very helpful troubleshooting pages from his file on baking. "This is likely to happen when you have an acute angle in your low poly that your normal map can’t compensate for or is struggling with because of the UV seam Where the UV edges meet, the extreme colour from one poly to the other may blend creating an artefact new colour that creates this line."

Also although I felt that I learnt a lot and improved as I worked when it came to painting the stylised textures of my diffuse map, the design of my UV map let me down hugely! As I had not thought about the textures enough when designing and thus I have wood grains that don't match up and create a very bad effect. They kind of ruin the Chest, It looks okay from the front, well ok'ish.

Setting A Project (easy peasy)

Probably one of the most fundamental basic maya knowledge to make life a little bit easier that I have only just got round to learning, turns out its really easy once someone shows you. Should have learnt it much earlier.
Allows me to keep all my files (scenes and images) in one place that i can easily transport around.