My Castle/Rook

[Baiswith]

Hilariously, I actually found this much harder to model than the knight…

Wandered very far afield from the course in order to get decent procedural brick texturing and figure out how to mask in the banner textures and faction colours. Still very messily implemented (multiple textures for different faces so the banners are in the right place), but until I decide I want a masters degree in maths/blender nodes, it’ll do. It’s at least straightforward to change the faction colours (something I was careful to build in).

Model Stats: 1056 Tris, 372 Faces, 510 Verts

Deliberately designed to overhang its base slightly on two sides - the conceit being that if you had the two pieces next to each other, you could place them so they actually form a sort of bulwark.

There seems to be an issue with the textures depending how the pieces are rotated - I’m hoping this will self-fix if the rotation is applied, but haven’t actually tested it yet.

[NP5]

Excellent Rook!

Trying procedural textures too. They can get hugely complex and are a whole deep separate world to fall into. Placing image textures has its difficulties and issues but at core are much simpler. As a simple person I avoid such maths degree level stuff and at best copy something blindly from a tutorial with procedural textures.

[Baiswith]

I admit, that’s what I resorted to with the bricks; I combined the nodes for those with those I’d put together for a ‘greenscreen’ node tutorial, and extrapolated from that to get the second layer of masking for the faction colour. It was actually a really good way to build on the original tutorial.

Working on the king right now (well, just about to break for the night!), and while the fur texture I’ve come up with isn’t quite the iconic black-spotted white ermine (I thought that might be confusing with one faction being ‘white’), and is nowhere near as complex as the rook, I’m pretty pleased with it being the first texture I’ve done without following any guidance. Knowing me, half of it may be redundant, but it works, lol.

[Tyger2]

I did a few Ducky3D tutorials on YouTube. He does a lot with procedural textures, and does a good job of teaching a few core concepts per video. Helped me get a better grasp of some procedural basics. I highly recommend.

[Baiswith]

Cool, thanks @Tyger2 - I’ll have to check those out (more learning resources never hurt!). I watched Default Cube’s Blender Procedural Nodes [Level 1 - Full Course] video for the screening/masking, but it definitely helps to have a good maths foundation for his videos, and I wouldn’t necessarily rate him the highest for teaching someone who’s completely new to Blender/shading nodes.

Edit: small world - turns out Ducky3D is whose tutorial let me make the lava squares on my procedural chessboard! https://community.gamedev.tv/t/board-with-generated-square-textures/145728