Barrel
Every school year I forward to The Summer of Really Learning 3D Modeling. Unfortunately, it keeps getting canceled—usually by equally good things. But I really can’t let September come around again and not have made any 3D models in a traditional modeling program. So, I watched an old video that I had saved and made myself a barrel.
I must have missed something in the video, however. The narrator essentially UV mapped the barrel twice. The first time he mapped one plank to the wood texture. This gave the barrel its base albedo. It didn’t look natural, however, because all the other planks were generated by an array modifier and were identically textured.
To break up the monotony, he applied the array modifier to realize each individual plank. He then mapped them one by one to the wood texture. But he used this second mapping only to selectively paint on some variety with projective painting. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just map the individual planks to different texels right off the bat to get varying albedo?