To create my speakeasy, I would need to start from the ground up- or in this case, the floor. To do this, I will need a realistic floor texture, which can react to light in full detail. I followed a tutorial on how to edit a texture to create bump, reflection and displacement maps, and how to implement these in Blender.
The tutorial showed me how to create the aforementioned texture maps, and how to configure nodes to display them correctly. Unlike the bump and reflection maps, the displacement map is implemented with a modifier instead of nodes. This is done by subdividing the surface 100 times and adding a displace modifier.
During the tutorial, I made a few simple mistakes that hindered my progress. My first mistake is that I couldn’t see the nodes. To troubleshoot this, I changed to cycles render, UV unwrapped the texture, added a new material in node view and toggled the use nodes option. My second mistake is that I couldn’t see the texture. I initially thought the material wasn’t on the plane, but it turns out that I was in solid view instead of material view. It was a simple mistake that I overlooked because I was following the tutorial, which was very fast paced.
I found this tutorial effective, because it taught me how to create detailed textures in Blender instead of just Unreal, which will be useful when creating individual items and scenes outside of a game engine.
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