Low Poly Hand Painted models

jwest

I'm working on a couple pieces with low poly counts and purely hand painted textures.

Also I didn't need to but wanted to practice conserving texture space and using lower rez maps but more of them, rather then just a giant 2048 like I have done in the past.

Anyway here is some progress so far on one of the buildings. Will have more updates soon, let me know what you guys think.

Justin Meisse

That's super cute, it has alot of character. I hope you're going to sharpen up the tree and plank textures because they aren't as sharp as the door and stairs.

Richard Kain

The style of this piece is very appealing. I don't necessarily agree on sharpening up the tree and plank textures. Those are more organic elements, so it is understandable that they would have sharper definition. I do think that the vines you are painting need some more detail, though.

Also, from a technical standpoint, I think that model could use a LOT of optimization. I'm seeing wasted polys all over the place. I'm also not sure about the clipping of the branches through the roof. Those seams are a bit jarring once they are painted. And the nature of your painting makes it difficut to compensate for that in the texture.

Naturally, the polycount is going to be contingent on what this model is going to be used for. If this is going to be a centerpiece in a town environment, then the polycount you are using is probably fine.

jwest

thanks for the comments guys. I went ahead and reworked a lot of my textures to show more detail. Still trying to figure out how to cope with the trees coming through the roof because that's how the concept has it as well. There will be tree leafs and branches cover it though so we'll see.

Any how here is an update on my textures thus far.

Justin Meisse

hmm, you could cut simple holes in the mesh where the tree branches pass through. And yeah, mesh could use some optimizing but I'm figuring you work like me, optimize laterzzzzzz

okno

Looks good so far. You could also texture in a tiny ring of moss/dirt around the parts where the branches poke out of the roof, or texture "knots" in the roof at those locations.

Mauricio Cunha

Nice texture !

killingpeople

Looks like a cool start to me man, I'd ease up on the contrast on the tree branch stuff and bring it's value range more where the rest of the piece is, at least try to remove some of the business in there, make larger chunks of light brown so it isn't distracting.

ManxViking

Could you show the concept so it's easier to see how the roof works. One thing which is annoying with the roof is it appears to be made of beams but the end is one flowing plane of wood. Surely it would follow the structure of the beams, heres quick doodle. As I say, don't know how the concept is but you may have overlooked this.



Looks nice so far, though the roots through the roof is odd, if you can't fix that in the texture due to reused UVs, maybe some really low geometry could be placed at the intersection, textured to look like breaches in the wood.

jwest

Got a new update, tried to address a lot of the issues that were brought up. I have a couple projects going on at the moment but I hope to come back and add some branches and leaves.


I also put a few of the texture maps i used on here as well as the concept. I have a lot of unused texture space, but I mainly wanted practice hand painting my textures and not so much for optimization in this model.

One specific problem I encountered was trying to get the detail in my textures to look as detailed on my model. So if anyone has any advice for this problem, I would appreciate it.

Michael Knubben

I've only got time for a quick post, so apologies if it comes across as being high and mighty, but one thing that bothers me is that you shade with black and white, and it makes things look, well... bad.
You'd do your paint-skills far more justice if you were to put some more thought into your colours. Since I'm being quick and lazy here, I'm counting on my fellow polycounters to make this post more useful by adding examples of colour-choices done right
Essentially, think about light and shadow, and which colours they'd pick up along the way. Is there a strong ambient colour in your scene? If so, why are your shadows black, etc...

edit; for a quick way to see what it'd look like, you can put a layer on overlay, fill it with a random colour, double-click the layer and set the blending (drag the absolute bottom white slider to the left untill the overlay only effects the shadows). Then ctrl-u (hue/saturation) on the overlay layer, and play around with different colours and stuff untill you get something you like. Do the same for mids and highlights. This is no substitute for having actually painted them this way, but it's fun to play around with, and it'll give you an adequate idea of what works and what doesn't.
Alt-clicking the black and white sliders in your blending options allows you to break them into two handles, by the way. This allows you to smooth the transition.
Here's a good tutorial on how to use it (in more clear terms than I've explained it, haha) http://www.cgtextures.com/content.php?action=tutorial&name=blendif

jwest

Wow thanks a lot, that is a really helpful tutorial. Can't wait to try out some of these methods.

Also when you say I shade with black and white, which part specifically do you mean, because most of the time I do try to shade with color. However I do use black and with to get the details and highlights, like the cracks on the wood. Just wondering which part of the painting you were referring to.

Justin Meisse

I posted this last night when I was pretty tired so let me rewrite my post:

You said you did this mainly for the fun of doing hand painted textures and you weren't worried with optimization and I can appreciate that.

Your pixel density is really inconsistant, your front door has almost as much UV space as the whole front of the house. It's good practice to keep your pixel density consistent on environment work.

you can devote less uv space to stuff that the player will never get close too, like the stuff on top of your building but don't go too extreme because you never know if it's going to be placed in a way that a character can get up there or a cinematic camera will put the low rez area front and center.

I also think you could reduce this to:

wall wood plank tiling texture

roof wood plank tiling texture

tree bark tiling texture

1 or 2 unique items/trim texture

then you can make multiple different houses with the same textures