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Example Next Gen environment art

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polycounter lvl 19
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JordanW polycounter lvl 19
So there isnt much environment art that get's posted, and we've all seen a lot of next gen characters and such, but not a lot of environment or texture work. So last night i threw together a little 512px wall texture. It's not the greatest thing in the world but hopefully it can help answer any questions about next gen texturing.

The max files i included require max8. I didnt include the final highpoly max file with all the objects from zbrush because it was around 90 megs, but i did include the Z tools which obviously require zbrush. I also included the .PSD for my diffuse texture. If you dont have max you should be able to plug the 3 .tgas into a .fx shader of your choice and see the same thing.

walltexture.jpg

Any questions about this stuff i'll be happy to answer, i also may be posting more examples if this proves useful to anyone.

Replies

  • Psyk0
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    Psyk0 polycounter lvl 18
    Thanks, i'll take a look at it for sure.
  • sinistergfx
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    sinistergfx polycounter lvl 18
    Cool dude!

    Yeah, the environment guys haven't really been representing (me included). Glad to see you step up.

    This "open source" art approach is cool, too. Makes me want to do something similar.
  • Tulkamir
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    Tulkamir polycounter lvl 18
    Awesome, as an aspiring environment artist this is just great. Thanks man. smile.gif
  • Thegodzero
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    Thegodzero polycounter lvl 18
    tin, any idea why everyone is making the paint have a bump to it? That is some really fucking thick paint if its got a bump like that.
  • Xenobond
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    Xenobond polycounter lvl 18
    The paint has to be thick in the phuture. It's gotta be able to withstand all of those beta and gamma rays. Duh!

    Looks nice. Not Roman enough!
  • JordanW
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    JordanW polycounter lvl 19
    tgz, why not? it adds some interest, and if the surface has been painted time and time again it'll have some bump to it, hell my past 2 apartments i've lived in have been repainted so much that you can see layers of paint in areas. You can even end up with bumpy paint if you're not careful the first time around.
  • Thegodzero
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    Thegodzero polycounter lvl 18
    Tin, i do it too, but it still strikes me as odd every time.
  • Striff
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    Striff polycounter lvl 18
    Hey Tin, thanks a ton for sharing this.

    One question, I was looking at your difuse, and on the top layer is where you bring out some of the lowlights..I think that is what they are called. This really helps define the texture alot. How did you go about making that layer?

    *Edit* Came up with another question.

    I noticed in your spec map, it has color in it. I have seen a couple people use color in their spec maps, and I way I always though of it was that it was only supposed to be anywhere between white and black. Why do some people use color?
  • Thegodzero
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    Thegodzero polycounter lvl 18
    tin finaly decided to download it and see that it has a nasty tiling issue in all the maps. I'm guessing your larger final doesn't have this issue?

    Striff, drop the spec map into the spec color slot and youl see why people make them. alot of difrent materials need a color spec map because the specular color isnt always white. to make good gold you need yellow spec color and brown diffuse so that when it gets hit it looks like gold and not shit.
  • JordanW
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    JordanW polycounter lvl 19
    TGZ basically summed up the reason there's color in the spec map, as far as that layer on top of my diffuse it's the ambient occlusion render from the highpoly geometry. It's rendered out of max at the same time i do the normal map.

    Also this texture -doesn't- tile. I didnt really take the time to make sure all the maps line up, this should pretty straight forward and isnt really new to making next gen art.
  • EarthQuake
    Good to see someone doing something like this. I may have time soon to add something here myself if thats not a problem, no promises tho =).
  • StrangeFate
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    StrangeFate polycounter lvl 18
    It looks like you just ran some stuff through the PS normalmal filter, rather than modeling the stuff properly in hipoly ?
  • sinistergfx
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    sinistergfx polycounter lvl 18
    Your reading comprehension is astonishing.
  • Lee3dee
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    Lee3dee polycounter lvl 18
    thx for sharing tinman, nice to see your process of making next-gen cubes.

    whats the best way to add scratches to a normal map texture?
  • rooster
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    rooster mod
    I was also wondering about the scratches, I guess its got something to do with the ps normal map plugin but I've not yet had a go with it
  • JordanW
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    JordanW polycounter lvl 19
    Most of the scratches were done in zbrush, some of the very small ones were done in PS. I took the painted scratch layer from the diffuse ran the nvidia filter on it in a couple of diff ways, like one sharp one and one blurry one and faded the two.

    And strangefate if you'd download the files or read what i said in the first post you'll notice that everything is modeled, except for the painted stripe and the really fine scratches at the top.
  • StrangeFate
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    StrangeFate polycounter lvl 18
    i can read that, i'd just expect more from something modeled ?
    Everything that texture has can be done through the PS filter, saving 80% of the time invested.

    Not trying to be an ass or anything, but if you're taking the time to model something, i'd try to come up with shapes and designs that make it worth it.

    That texture is all simple bevels which is what the PS filter will ever do, and all you need to create something like that.
    Using hipoly models allows you to bring in any angle in the normalmap (PS filter is always a sharp 45degrees for the bevels it does) and any curved or rounded shape and deepness effect you want.
  • adam
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    adam polycounter lvl 19
    Great job on this Tinman, a lot of people will find it helpful. I'm in the midst of writing a tutorial on something very similar so its nice to see others do stuff on this.

  • Steakhouse
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    Steakhouse polycounter lvl 18
    Nice tips Adam. I especially agree with your blue square adjustment. There's a lot more realism and depth there then with straight black.

    I'm not to sure about the purple square though. It might be the crappy homemade wiskey sour rolling through me but I'm not terribly clear what you've changed because I can't see the opposite (or original) bevel to compare it.
  • adam
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    adam polycounter lvl 19
    There's some slight ambient occlusion baked in around the the metal extrusions and the bolt. And I added some damage to the inner metals edging.
  • Weiser_Cain
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    Weiser_Cain polycounter lvl 18
    I've totaly seen black grout, I've also seem the grout worn away enough that you cant see it unless you look directly into the crack. Not saying this is it, I'm just saying I've seen it.
  • JordanW
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    JordanW polycounter lvl 19
    So this thread was more about how all of the textures work together to make a 'shader' rather than me showing off my l33t subD skills. I modeled something very basic that would show off materials easily without creating too many confusing layers, i'm sure that in your years of experience you should show us some excelent high poly models StrangeFate....

    Adam, I agree that the cracks may have gone too black but that's not to say they cant be very dark, if the crack is deep enough there would be no light reaching it, so that doesnt mean that it has to be as light as you made it, plus if the crack IS deep in the normal map but light in every other map it will look strange because it will be recieving lighting and specular in areas it should not. As far as the purple square I cannot tell what you did.

    The paint is not gathering occlusion, I added brown stain around it/underneat it because if there were areas that were worn away it would have gathered dust and grime to replace the paint.

    I highly recommend other's submit some work to this thread, it would be nice to see work that other people have done as well...like SinisterGFX said... open source art.
  • adam
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    adam polycounter lvl 19
    Well, the grout in photoshop is pure black. As a general rule of thumb no textures should be black if developed for a videogame. The brown stain looks like a shadow to me.
  • stoofoo
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    stoofoo polycounter lvl 18
    I dont even wanna read this post anymore.

    It's cool that you are ever-opinionated, Mario. I like that. I understand what you are saying, too. However, in the spirit of the thread, perhaps you could post something to show your thoughts instead of pissing in someone else's cornflakes? Hehe. We are all aware you know what you are talking about, but its coming across as a bit of douchebaggery.

    Adam: Please do 3 more paintovers illustrating your high level of expertise on materials involving latex and various lubcricants. I would like to hear more. It's amazing what a few months being paid to make art does to people. *high five*
  • adam
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    adam polycounter lvl 19
    [ QUOTE ]
    I dont even wanna read this post anymore.

    It's cool that you are ever-opinionated, Mario. I like that. I understand what you are saying, too. However, in the spirit of the thread, perhaps you could post something to show your thoughts instead of pissing in someone else's cornflakes? Hehe. We are all aware you know what you are talking about, but its coming across as a bit of douchebaggery.

    Adam: Please do 3 more paintovers illustrating your high level of expertise on materials involving latex and various lubcricants. I would like to hear more. It's amazing what a few months being paid to make art does to people. *high five*

    [/ QUOTE ]

    You're an asshole. You want to comment on Mario's attitude? Check out yours before hand, hypocrit.

    Sure I've been in-house for 9 months, but I've also got a couple of years experience as a contractor. HOWEVER, this is completely irrelevant as I was offering a critique. I don't have to be super awesome at what I do to offer a critique - especially in a forum that's all about C&C.

    This is the exact reason why I hardly post in P&P anymore because of people like you with the shitty mindset that critism isn't justified if the person giving it isn't "sup0r l33t" in anothers eyes.
  • poopinmymouth
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    poopinmymouth polycounter lvl 19
    Thanks for posting Tinman.

    poop.gif
  • adam
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    adam polycounter lvl 19
    I haven't posted a crit in a long, long time. And outlining some stuff here is the most I've done in an even longer time. He offered the PSD file up and instead of contributing I wanted to offer some advice. I don't think my work is better, nor did I do it looking for attention, that's a pretty lame thing to think. The diffuse critique wasn't directly for Tinman but more for anyone else that is going to get in on this, and it's already been helpful to a couple of people so I did what I wanted to do. Agreed, in hindsight I should have kept in on topic and maybe poked around in his normal map a little. Stoofoo, however, is completely out of line with his comments and really makes it hard to want to *ever* post a critique again. Perhaps I will go to other forums where the help is a little more appreciated and continue to just browse GD here.

    Sigh.
  • cholden
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    cholden polycounter lvl 18
    Good post, tinman. This should prove helpful to beginners and myself as I recently switched to max for work, and have yet to learn all the material setups for next gen environment art. Your frankentitty character is awesome too.
  • moose
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    moose polycount sponsor
    need%20a%20hug.jpg

    cool post tinman. smile.gif
  • Daz
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    Daz polycounter lvl 18
    I dunno Adam, I wouldn't beat yourself up about it. I just think you went a little overboard. Yes, this is a forum for P&P, but intense critique with paintovers doesn't seem appropriate in this instance. That's just not what the post was about. This is tinman offering up help for beginners with this stuff, so in intensely publically critiquing it, you're sort of undermining the post. I'm not saying you shouldn't do that per se, I'm just saying that it's not surprising that you're going to get flak for that really is it?

    Ironically, just as you say you dont want to crit this board anymore, maybe tinman doesn't want to provide example work for free anymore? Worth thinking about.

    Looks great tinman and thanks for taking the time out. Maybe posting in the 2D/3D section would have been more fitting? shrug.
  • adam
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    adam polycounter lvl 19
    Good point, critique removed and I'll save it for another time. Yeesh, what a morning.
  • Daz
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    Daz polycounter lvl 18
    Darnit, I knew I should have gone into a career of international peace negotiation! smile.gif Im so wasted pushing polys. Off to fix the Middle East, cya!

    sorry for the derailment ;-p
  • gauss
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    gauss polycounter lvl 18
    so much talk of urination: pissing in cornflakes, angry male cat urination--are we all excited for Wii or what?

    I know we are all valiant crusaders of truth and good modeling/texturing techniques, but can we all just give these threads some personal distance? talk about work and not each other. try and refrain from posting witty snipes; it doesn't reeally improve relations with fellow polycounters and it isn't terribly witty. and now to our individual admonishments!

    StrangeFate and Brome both have contributed to this thread. SF brings up the very important issue of using Photoshop-generated normals vs. high poly modeling. There are an amazing number of artists right now, but amateur and professional, under the misguided impression that the only "proper" way to generate a normal map is to model it as high-poly first, or do some Z-Brushing. SF is right to bring attention to using the Photoshop normal plugin when only simple normal geometry is required.
    Brome was also contributing in the form of bringing up issues related to texturing as relates to normal maps. Brome, I know how it is, but don't let this discourage you from helping out or posting in P&P. while i can see how some members might view his post as distracting from tinman's, he took the time and contributed.

    which is more than i can say for stoofoo or poop. shame on both of you! smile.gif Stoof: SF made his point, and it was a valid one--while he may not have been exactly delicate about it, he wasn't nearly as rude as you were calling him out on it. And unlike SF, you aren't contributing to the thread. Neither are you, Poop. Throwing around clever invectives and calling out other people for not contributing, when what's keeping the thread off-topic are posts like yours, not the ones you're calling attention to.

    Here's an idea: if you really believe in not derailing the thread, don't post in it. send a private message and get it sorted out elsewhere. nobody like dirty laundry, especially in a thread ostensibly for helping people.


    Tinman, this is an excellent choice for a tutorial thread, and a great way to tie in some of the recent graphic advances together in one place so people can understand it better. hopefully others will follow suit and we'll have some more examples for normal map generation and texturing.

    edit: and of course i was on the phone before i could finish writing the rest of this. damn you Daz, you and your conflict resolution before an admin can step in! that's just selfish. laugh.gif
  • EarthQuake
    WOW B1LL WAS RIGHT! Normals maps are evil, look at all the hatred they cause!!!!

    Now my opinion on the whole painted vrs modeling thing, even for simple shapes i still prefer to model, creating bump maps by hand has always been a pain in the ass for me and i'de rather be in modo modeling that stuff any day, its not like its going to take an excessive amout of time to model something like this out. For me personally the quality of generating it from a model would be higher, but that just may be my lack of proper leet bump map making skills. And also the fact that you can render out ambient maps and depth maps and etc make a good case for modeling as well. As long as your renderer isnt ass slow(omg xsi sux hate hate hate) i dont really see much of a time loss, if you're using something with fast ambocc like xnormal you can get the stuff rendered out in a matter of minutes, so its jsut a tradeoff of time spent modeling vrs time spent in photoshop. And what you're faster with, me personally i would be faster modeling it.
  • adam
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    adam polycounter lvl 19
    I generally do both. I'll block out a lot of the major shapes I want to come out in the normal map, and any little ones I could make more quickly with 3DS max. But details for scratched and any damage related info I'd like in the normal map I'll do via Photoshop. I'll be covering both of these in the tutorial I'm writing.
  • EarthQuake
  • aniceto
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    aniceto polycounter lvl 18
    thanks for posting that tinman, im a bit of a noob in this area so im sucking in all the info i can get smile.gif
  • StrangeFate
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    StrangeFate polycounter lvl 18
    Wow, things do always get out of hand rather quick here.

    I think Gauss summed it all quite neat.

    It's just as important that people know which techniques and tools to use WHEN.
    I'd rather hire someone who told me he did that texture in PS, than someone who had modeled it in hipoly and did parts of it in ZBrush, which would take about 2-4 times longer.

    Next gen texture/prop work is so time intensive that it's very important that people know HOW to work properly, and which is the most efficient way to get things done.
    I did download the zip, i couldn't check out the models since i dont use max and didnt have the time at work to play around with anything. I just flew over the maps and the normalmap was PS filterish.

    I wasn't trying to make your post look bad or anything, it's perfectly valid for what you're trying to communicate.
    However i think people learning the 'how to' of next gen need to learn the 'when to' along with it.

    If i came over harsh, i'm sorry, i blame the medium.
    I try to tell people at work straight forward what's wrong and needs to change or be redone, and i could swear that i usually feel worse doing my part than they do.

    Sometimes you have to make people think. Telling someone to redo something is not gonna improve the quality of their future work nor their workflow.
    Most issues happen because people don't think (timeframes, resources) and look (compare with other people's work and overall output and quality).
    Asking what the hell they were thinking usually helps figure out where the problem is and put them in the right direction.

    Dealing with bad workflows is just as painfull and hurts the output as much as plain bad quality.

    If i tried to talk around issues in the most sensible way possible to not hurt anyone's feelings, i'd spend the whole day talking with people rubbing their backs and wouldn't get anything done myself, nor would they probably.
    This shouldn't ever be necessary anyway, as we're all grown ups and can deal with input the right way.

    *edit: and while i see that all this go way beyond what you had in mind, i think it's one of the strengths of polycount, that you'll always get tips, input and help beyond what most forums can offer.
  • JordanW
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    JordanW polycounter lvl 19
    StrangeFate, your last post sums up my problem I have with where this thread went. I pretty much completely disagree with the fact that you believe it would take so much longer to actually model. Modeling this was very quick and so was the zbrushing, and from it I was able to get a normal map, an occlusion map and the base diffuse color. Creating a heightmap in Photoshop would certainly have taken longer and been many more layers to manage. We could go back and forth about this all day, but it was not the point of this thread. My intention was to have something people could contribute to and show 'open' examples on, rather than having to defend technique to you.
  • easterislandnick
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    easterislandnick polycounter lvl 17
    Hiya, as some one whose just been turned down for a job for not being next gen enough this is a really interesting post, the whole painted vs modelled normal maps thing is gonna run and run I feel!
    Any way, Tinman, thanks for the files, its rare to be able to have a propper look at this sort of stuff so kudos to you! Any chance of some more examples......
  • Rhinokey
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    Rhinokey polycounter lvl 18
    on imperator i made oodles of normals for textures verry similiar to the example tinman posted, and i experimented with high poly and the photoshop options, in most cases similiar to his example, i chose modeling, modeling shapes like that is super quick and efficient if you make good use of lots of floating geo,

    i personaly prefer the look of modeled normals over photoshop rendered ones.

    but when doing photoshop ones, be sure that you think of it as painting a height map, and not a difuse,, i've seen a lot of people take their difuse and just greyscale it and run it thru the normal mapper.. thats one of my biggest normal map pet peeves
  • odium
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    odium polycounter lvl 18
    I've tried both modeled and painted local maps and let me tell you, i would rathre model it EVERY time. Painting it just causes waaaaaay to many head aches...
  • ElysiumGX
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    ElysiumGX polycounter lvl 18
    [ QUOTE ]
    i've seen a lot of people take their difuse and just greyscale it and run it thru the normal mapper.. thats one of my biggest normal map pet peeves

    [/ QUOTE ]
  • Lee3dee
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    Lee3dee polycounter lvl 18
    [ QUOTE ]
    i've seen a lot of people take their difuse and just greyscale it and run it thru the normal mapper.. thats one of my biggest normal map pet peeves

    [/ QUOTE ]

    so i guess thata large majority of all net-gen games. The photoshop filter seems to do a good job of faking the process of normal mapping when it comes to simple objects, like walls and object assets. It looks like terrible when games use it as a substitiute for making a high poly model. frown.gif

    if time wasn't an issue for making next-gen models for normal mapping i think more companies would take the high poly modeling option.
  • StrangeFate
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    StrangeFate polycounter lvl 18
    [ QUOTE ]
    I've tried both modeled and painted local maps and let me tell you, i would rathre model it EVERY time. Painting it just causes waaaaaay to many head aches...

    [/ QUOTE ]

    Well that's the thing, you dont need to paint any heightmap for a texture like this one to get a PS normalmap off it.

    All you do is mask the shapes you want beveled and fill them with a solid gray, brighter gray = bevel, darker = inset. THe texture shown is pretty much just simple bevels with some screws or so.
    You set the deepness you want in the PS filter, and you get pretty much the same normalmap we have here, takes 15mins if you have a clear idea of what you want, plus you can use the created masks to separate the different areas and materials when painting the colormap.

    Normalmaps off hipoly models will always look better, and i prefer to model as much as i can myself, some things tho, are just hard to justify.

    But anyway, if you do have 5 years to make 1 game, then you can afford to model everything for sure.
  • JordanW
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    JordanW polycounter lvl 19
    I may be drunk for doin this again but here's another texture. The zip for this is like 22 megs so it'll take a min to download, like before I wasnt able to include the zbrushed mesh in the max file because of file size.

    A few things to note, some of the layers in the PS file were collapsed together, specifically the painted ones near the bottom, i had them masked off for easier painting but it just made the file bigger and i wanted to try and make this at least a little smaller file.

    The texture was designed to tile in the modeling stage but i didnt take the last step to maatch up all of the final images, i may do it but i wanted to upload this now because i didnt know when i could get back to it.

    I included the max file to show how the vines were done, i used a technique rorsarch explain in IRC one night which uses a follow spline modifier...just click on em and check out their stacks i didnt collapse.

    Something I tried with this one was to apply some generic bump maps to the models before rendering the normal map to add some grain to them, i think it helped and it was super easy to do, i also gave the meshes REALLY rough coloring in max which you can see in the bottom layer of the PS, it helped i think and was a neat workflow to try.

    anyways here's a screengrab and a link!

    vinewall2.jpg
  • dur23
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    dur23 polycounter lvl 19
    Thats awesome tinman.
  • Sage
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    Sage polycounter lvl 19
    Thanks for taking the time. I hope you keep posting more examples. They are nice.

    Alex
  • TelekineticFrog
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    TelekineticFrog polycounter lvl 18
    Yep. Thank you for continueing to post your work and explaining your processes. It is appreciated.
  • aniceto
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    aniceto polycounter lvl 18
    thanks for putting your work out there tinman, being able to see work like this is a great learning tool for people like me.

    now i know wtf to do with emissive maps smile.gif

    /noob

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