World Of Warcraft FANART: Undead Starting Zone [image heavy!]
polycounter lvl 6
hey! I realised I made too much to post in "show your handpainted stuff thread". So I figured I would make a thread myself, so I can get C&C. I will post a lot of works in progress. The project itself is completely for fun, and I don't really have a planm, haha, but thats fine. Like the title says, I'm working on a redesign of the undead starting zone in WoW. Here's some of the stuff I've been working on for the last couple weeks:
@Pixelatedkiwi This is going to be my thread from now on
Can you give your thoughts on the tree? Would be awesome!
@AntonioNeves Thanks again, I'll work on it today!
I got some advice from Antonio. Which I'll be working on next. Should be a relatively easy fix:
@Pixelatedkiwi This is going to be my thread from now on
Can you give your thoughts on the tree? Would be awesome!@AntonioNeves Thanks again, I'll work on it today!
I got some advice from Antonio. Which I'll be working on next. Should be a relatively easy fix:
Replies
@Wendy de Boer Thanks!
You asked me about next project, i dont know when to start yet, maybe some wow fan art like you are doing, lets see... I will let you know soon
@Evolvyn cool! thanks!
For me personally they are looking a bit realistic, you could try pushing the stylization a bit more, possibly some subtle color variations/gradients in both the trunk and foliage for more of a wow feel. You can also add some flavor with things like cobwebs around the branches, glowing eyes in the dark spots, anything that helps push the spooky/quirky feeling of the undead.
These aren't undead area trees but it helps illustrate my point more clearly:
Looking forward to seeing more.
thanks for the advice dude. Hmmm yeah I know what you mean. I'll try to find some more reference from WoW (I allready looked at these ones on jessica dinh's blog
Was really busy last 2 days... but I have started working on some stuff for a graveyard. After this I'll try to work on things to define the bigger picture a little better, like trees and rocks, instead of focussing on detail so much. But this seemed like fun to make. the new grave stone needs some edges fixed up, and I have a wooden grave in mind too what do you guys think of that? I didn't want to make it a cross, since it doesnt really fit in the warcraft universe.
the idea for the simplest grave:
it may look too muxh like a totem, it's really hard to think of something thats not just a cross.
next up. like I said, I'll try to fix up the tree, with the advice from pixelatedkiwi, some rocks, and starting on some of the fences and palisades
Also, your results from baking and texturing looks so good! I had abandoned zbrush sculpting in lieu of only painting, for time & the betterment of my painting skills, but seems like it instead saves you time to sculpt first.
I desaturated and blurred the image to focus on the main shapes and as you can see nothing really stands out.
keep it up!
Hmm, yeah I could always darken or lighten things slightly. But I guess color contrst is also a thing right?
can't wait to see more!
@Cremuss Yeah I will try to add more value changes, but to the entire object, because the shading on the objects itself reads pretty well. I also dont use sculpts for every object. I always work from a base texture that I create using the bakes, adding the lighting later using the green channel from the normal is not a really good idea in my opinion. I agree on desaturating the image to check values, but blurring seems a bit overkill to me. I'll try to makes things like trees,rocks etc, readable from a distance using more value changes.
Also made a simple layout template for the update screenshots, It'll look a little less random.
I still have to make some variations on the tree. I'm thinking of making color variations for different trees too. I also made the stem a little darker. These textures are all for testing purposes, so nothing is set in stone, yet.
waiting to see more
I've made some more progress on the trees. I made one version that's a little more blue. And some trees that are (partially) dead too.
Great work so far ! Can't wait to see it finished !
The overall looks really good and I 'm agreed with the feedbacks you already received !
Since I'm not a big expert in foliage, I let that for other people to critic ( looks good to me !) but I did some paint over on some of your textures.
I think, especially for the wood, be carefull with your occlusion which seems very dark and strong. If you re using a zbrush base, don't hesitate to use several matcaps and composite them in photoshop before painting over. Usually I tried to avoid real black and white in almost all of my texturing.
To balance my contrast, I used two layers filled with color in photoshop. One with a "darker color" blending option to turn down the brightness and add a color in my highlights; and one with a "lighter color" option, to turn up my dark areas.
Don't forget to also add an "unsharp mask" at the end to sharpen your textures a little bit ( used with moderation ! )
I also added a little bit of information in the textures, but if you prefer having a more "loose" style it works too !
It's something I usually adjust by looking at the tiling if there are too many details !
Thanks for the feedbacks on my thread btw
I tried using matcaps, but usually textures start to look like plastic, might be the wrong choice of matcaps, but I'll just have to watch my value range in the future, I think taht will improve things big time. Yeah I like the more defined/detailed style, I guess that's also a matter of putting in time (as wel as knowing how to add detail of course), so I will defenetely go back to those textures in the (near) future.
yeah, I always feel a little stupid giving critique, as I'm not at a professional level yet. But Like I said in your thread, see it as my opinion on things.
You thanks for your feedback on my thread
For everyone else: I'll be gone (on vacation) for the next 2 weeks, where I can't really work on this project. So don't expect updates (Although I will read the things people write
A little update before I go on vacation! I painted over the old wooden plank textue I did, and took @Faf 's tips and tried to make it work. Matching the same style was really hard, but everyone has a little bit of his own painting style, I guess. I think this is a huge improvement, even though there's still some areas I need to paint a little bit more.
Like I already said, its just details, your texture already looks good!
For anyone else: I just wanted to mention this project will not be finished soon. My art course starts in 4 weeks and I have some other stuff to do as well. I will work as hard as I can, though!
Here's the rock texture! C&C appreciated! (keep in mind I'm nowhere near done painting)
The rocks look a little too "manmade" I guess. They don't look very unatural, but for now I'll leave it like this (I would probably redo the textue at some later date). But I've done some more painting on it. I've inculded some update images here, to show some of the bakes I've used. I also included an example for the height based texturing I was talking about.
Have you ever used matcaps for 3d object, I never got that to work that well, or for tilable textures only?
I'd love to see how you setup your base/composite-texture btw!
I thought about how I could use matcaps for 3d objects. I think you can use them, for symmetrical objects, like weapons and stuff. But for other stuff, I'm not sure. For 3d objects I'll continue to use a sculpt every now and then. But since using zbrush for handpainted textures for a little while, I also like to get back into doing things by hand.
Composite is a complete mess, I use all kinds of matcaps, bakes stuff like that, combining them until it looks the way I want. I dont use screenshots from zbrush, I rather use the normalmap, and blender to bake them that way (so I can get higher resolutions than 512).
as always C&C is welcome, but remember this image is just a test, and I'll be tweaking textures (and models).
keep it up, killer work!
@lotet really good idea! It makes sense to do that, but I kinda got lost making stuff of my own.
@Cremuss thanks. Yeah the lighting is a bit strange. But it's a bit strange in the original wow too. I think I'm aiming for a sunset kind of lighting, so long blue/purple shadows, and warm lighting. If I remember correctly the lighting in the original was also a sunset. But I'll definetely try to add some more (cast) shadows. Yeah the mist now is some standard, linear mist in blender. I wanted to keep it purple because that's the same as the original, and together with the teal/greenish sky gives anice oldschool look, I guess. Making swirly stuff would recuire volumetric stuff, not sure how to do that yet. And swirly stuf would probably mean animated textures too. I think it's a cool idea, but I would need to think about how to go about doing it.
thank for the replies guys, appreciate it