Hand Painted Texture(s) - Practice and Critique
polycounter lvl 11
Hey fellas.
I've been putting off learning this skill for a really long time. It's become apparent that it is a necessary skill to have, and can only help.
So I've been looking at the low poly thread and some other resources on how to do this quite effectively.
This is a thread that will document my progress, along with any helpful critiques that you guys can give me. I'll try and organize my projects in terms of materials (stone, wood, metal, etc).
Hopefully this thread can be a useful resource to anyone who is going through learning how to hand paint textures.
All these textures are creative commons. Feel free to download them and use them if you would like to.
Here is my first attempt at creating a tileable handpainted texture. C & C please. I need to learn this, so tear me apart so I can rebuild myself stronger :-)
Shot from crazybump
I've been putting off learning this skill for a really long time. It's become apparent that it is a necessary skill to have, and can only help.
So I've been looking at the low poly thread and some other resources on how to do this quite effectively.
This is a thread that will document my progress, along with any helpful critiques that you guys can give me. I'll try and organize my projects in terms of materials (stone, wood, metal, etc).
Hopefully this thread can be a useful resource to anyone who is going through learning how to hand paint textures.
All these textures are creative commons. Feel free to download them and use them if you would like to.
Here is my first attempt at creating a tileable handpainted texture. C & C please. I need to learn this, so tear me apart so I can rebuild myself stronger :-)
Shot from crazybump
Replies
Vj
Secondly some people have said it looks a lot like wax. This is a combination of two reasons, one is that your normal map is totally flat on the bricks, which will present a perfectly even highlight over the surface resulting in so specular difference at all, and two because you appear to not even be using a spec map. Rock doesn't really shine that much, so try at first going with a really dark colour, possibly a dark warm colour or maybe blue, but keep the spec levels low.
It does work though, and has a nice style. I can't fault you for what you've done on the diffuse, its really nice and depends on the style of art your going for anyway.
Even if you are going for a handpainted look, if you are going to use normal maps then you should not paint in as much lighting information as you have here. Edge highlights should just be due to worn down exposed edges turning a different color, and should be equally spread around the different exposed edges.
That parallax in Crazybump looks pretty sweet eh!
/Spit
*DING*
Crits:
- Too much lighting info in the diffuse. Specifically the highlights painted with what looks like one specific light source in mind.
- Normal is missing info. No dents, dings, or noisy stone detail.
- Spec is also your diffuse? Right now your diffuse works more like a spec, remove the painted highlights, and turn the spec to have more subtle highlights around almost every edge not just from one imagined light source.
its seams a bit confussed what your trying to acheive, i would either hand paint everything, or normal/spec map it and use a shader to work with the hand painted effect.
Perhaps make a version of it without the highlights, a more detailed normal map, then toss it into crazybump again?
Yea so i'd hate to make excuses but the reason the normal map came out flat is because i actually lost the PSD due to a photoshop crash, so i just had a flat layer left over because i was lucky enough to save it out to send to a friend. So i actually had to go in and create a sort of height map to get the normal to come out right, and i didn't take the time to hand paint in all the cracks and such.
So what i've taken in so far... if i'm planning to use a normal map and a spec map with a hand painted texture, leave out the highlights and let the normal map and spec map do that job for me.
For Rock - Hard brushes, no soft gradients.
Guys i am going to redo this texture with all the information yo have just given me.
Thank you so much for all the feedback!
I say focus on just 1 tile in photoshop and practice on it before you do a tileable texture. Groves arenever that dark, always make it a bit darker than what is around. In reality groves IRL are the lightest area because cement that they use is sometimes white, it's just painted darker in games for the sake of the shadows and separation of planes. Play world of warcraft and you will learn a lot.
I tried to make it look a bit harder, i didn't add any highlights. I took Mazvix's advice into account and lightened the cracks a bit. I'll now work on the specular and normals.
[EDIT] Haha so my buddy spug was just like, "Well you threw a stone based texture overlay on it so it's not hand painted anymore."
Shit. I'll try and give it that same texture feel without texture overlays. :-)
this should be fun
You have to do it the "offset" way, you don't need a tutorial for that lol. Every artist has his own way of doing things, you have to find yours which means less worrying and more tackling.
rgb0 is not a color, do not use it. Think of paining on the 0-100 brightness scale, never go out of the 25-75 brightness range. This way, when you LIGHT your scene, the texture has somewhere to go (brighter or darker). You can paint this all in greyscale for learning (makes it easier). From there, just handpaint until it looks done. If you go greyscale, a great way to add color at the end is with a gradient map. You can use a mix of colors here for some stylish looking outcome. Either way, avoid that photo overlay as long as possible. If it has a texture you like, turn that into brush and use that.
I also got rid of the texture overlays and made a 2 brushes out of them. Here is the end result.
I'm going to start on the normals and spec now.
as long as it tiles properly without repeating too obviously it should look awsome (i'm guessing you can rotate certain tiles maybe?). Hope it looks cool on the normal map and all that too
edit: Here's a quick anim to show the process I just described. The result I made might be a bit too beaten up for what you're going for but the process is the main thing. Worth noting that the anim just shows layers, not time progression -- I switched between working on the soft and sharp layers several times while painting.
I also very much liked the one before the last because the style is very different: Where the first one looks quasi-photo-realistic, the second seems to have lost some integrity to blurring which has left it feeling semi-pr.
The final texture has been artistically amplified by your other work, the blur fits, but over all it leaves something to be desired as my taste was drawn to the really sharp and concrete looking one. I like the potential for a really funky normal map on that one more so than the last, and the offset - it's a good touch, but would be a sore thumb in any large setting. Make a uniform alternate, and you're set.
Great work, worth my first post here. You're on a distinguished path, I can only hope to carry this kind of skill in pS one day.
There's far too much black in the texture to make any normal map contribution useful for the cracks.
Makes my shitty handpainted textures look even more like a third grader playing with a tablet
I think this is one of those things that i'll definitely get better at over time as i refine my workflow.
Sirdelita i actually didn't use noise, i just used a custom brush. I am under the impression that filters are a no-no. I could be wrong though
If it looks "filtered" then you're doing it wrong =P
Looking forward to seeing mawr!
Things i kept in mind:
nothing is white and nothing is black
Stone scratches and chunks are usually lighter color
no photo overlays, so i created several new brushes based off of stone photos.
No light sources, since normals with spec will do alot of highlighting and shading for me.
I'm going to start tackling metal and stuff tomorrow, either that or wood. We'll see. Once again, feel free to rip those textures apart for me.
i think it destroys the handpainted look a bit, cause it makes it look very generic.
not to imply anything, but to me it seems you used the noise to generate some structure on the stones, so you don't have to paint it all in like ZackF described. admit !!
still i liked your very first version the best. you can just see the you put much more work in there, than the other tries, imo.
here are some examples that might help you
Also with that last example, it shows some good ways you can make the texture more interesting by pushing some of the rocks back, adding some damage here and there. You can go way beyond slightly different proportions and some minor cracks to make your texture a lot more appealing.
painting with mouse isnt that hard^^
nah thats why theres a gap between the function keys and the rest of em on yer keyboard
Yeahp...
Do you mean a layer where a hard brush us used and the other a soft brush?
http://files.getdropbox.com/u/1340077/Misc/stone-paintover-anim.gif