Finishing The Ark

Continuing with the method of adding and merging cylinders I finished the statue. Not content with the overall shape I put it through a couple of turbo-smoothing modifiers to give it a more sleek look while greatly increasing the rather low polycount.
This was a great opportunity for me to practise pelt mapping a mesh, as I usually make things that are quire rigid and angular in shape, whereas this is very much an organic object. Pelt mapping works in a similar way to skinning an animal for its pelt, hence the name. Seams are drawn in strategic places and then the sections that are created by these seams are flattened and relaxed to create an even space for the texture to be applied.
I didn't get it perfect in this case, the joints around the limbs, especially the back legs, are far too irregular. But overall the texture is smooth and partly due to the material it is relatively seamless.

Shown in the image to the left are the various layers that make this model's material. The wireframe and shaded mesh are to the far left, and to the middle is the normal map which is generated from the diffuse map using a handy little program called SSBump Generator. To create the diffuse map (second from right) I usually export a render of the unwrapped UVWs and paint directly onto that image. This is then applied directly to the model.
The final and furthest right is the specularity map. This tells the material how shiny it is and where. The darker the map the duller, and the lighter the shinier. This map was easy to make in this case, the statue is the only particularly shiny part of the model, so making a greyscale copy of the bump map and leaving the parts that correspond with the statue lighter while making the rest of the image darker gave the desired result.