Grass Texture - Hand Painted

Jakob Gavelli

Heya!

Been working on this for the past two days, the infamous grass texture!

It's mostly unique with some repeating elements to speed up the process, painting grass straws is really fricken boring.

I'm at a bit of a loss, in hindsight I wish I painted in stronger shadows and I'm reluctant to go filter crazy on it, it oftens ends up looking like plastic when I do.

I'd love some pointers as to how to improve the texture and where I went wrong.

Tiled 2x2 :

EDIT:
Without tiling:

Stockwell

Nice details, but it is far too flat, i really had to lean forward to see anymore than a blob of greens and some brown. Getting up close I like it, but you should see what this would look like with far more contrast.

Jakob Gavelli

@Stockwell : Yeah, I totally agree. I just don't know quite how to remedy the situation without starting over. I'll add the texture without tiling aswell, just for the record.

Needles

Quick play around with curves in Photoshop hope you dont mind.

Stockwell

Too much contrast, but the right idea i think, I think i would just add a brighter pass of highlights on the blades of grass.

Needles

Yeah Just a proof of concept lol xD

Havoc89

Looks cool. Personally I disagree with increasing contrast. I've worked on a couple of hand painted stylized games as an environment artist, and you really don't want to have contrast in your textures. Doing so will generate far too much noise. You ideally want your lighting and special effects to handle contrast. The way you have it now is perfect for working with.

Grindigo

Needles wrote: »

Quick play around with curves in Photoshop hope you dont mind.

http://i.imgur.com/uJ0DviW.png

That's way worse.


I'd advise to darken the shadows, either by correcting using levels or painting in some areas then add more glossiness on the leaves to bring them out more, contrast will balance itself out as long as you change some hue and add the gloss highlights, paint on another layer any changes further on you make, also it might be mine personal preference but keeping it not so crazily contrasted should let you play more with lighting in game engine without making an eye sore.

Jeff Parrott

I did a video of one way to do a grass texture fast. It's not the only way. Just a way I do it sometimes. It's nice to paint a few giant blades of grass with generic lighting info and then rotate, scale, etc around.

[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lV-8IGSyrk[/ame]


I think right now your texture is just painted with too small of a brush. Practice that. Honestly I'm never a giant fan of this type of grass texture (even the one I did) it's like someone put plexiglass on grass and took a picture. It just reads as really flat to me.

Jakob Gavelli

@Needles: Although harsh, it did get the point across. Comparing it to the original really made the values look washed out.

@Havoc89: I see where you're coming from, I did some comparisons when it comes to values with some other grass textures from WoW and similar games, and mine lacks constrast in comparison. Not by as much as I'd think though.

@Grindigo: I agree and I think I've done the proper adjustments. You get so used to looking at it though that it may still not be enough.

@Jeff Parrott: Grass is something so common and yet so hard, for me atleast. I've tried the Allods way of creating grass meshes and rendering them out, your way of photoshoping it up and lastly now trying to just roll up my sleeves and go full purist mode on it.

I think I ultimately got carried away and some minor perpective issues renders the whole thing flat. Maybe if I had more patience I would've spent more time on it before trying to copy some lumps of grass around etc.

Thanks for taking your time to reply and give me pointers!

I'm not quite out of the woods yet. Here's my attempt of salvaging the situation, I don't know. When adjusting values I always thinks it just looks like plastic :

Third

I think the biggest issue with the grass texture right now is the strong direction painted into it. It's drawn from a 3/4 perspective with a clear 'up' and 'down' with how the leaves bend through gravity. Unless the texture will only ever be seen in that orientation, try painting a more strict top-down perspective.

Quick example of a different viewpoint made in Paint.NET:

Grindigo

I wouldn't worry about strong direction in texture if you are going to cover it up with grass sprites and use it on the hills to give it a flow, but that's one case scenario, you want to have pretty good grass that goes in different directions and is reusable, good examples I tried to find.