PBR Stylized Book
polycounter lvl 8
Low poly with bake:
[original]
I've been wanting to get better with zbrush recently so have started making a few tiling materials there and then decided to finish an asset fully in zbrush (I may have done this one other time). So far this is my progress.
My crits on it:
1) The decorations on the outside look lumpy. I think I have figured out why this was happening and could be equated to doing hairy lines, just I was doing it with trim dynamic. I was doing short jerky strokes, whereas strong smooth long strokes work better.
2) Not necessarily a fan of the texture on the book currently. May go closer to a more dimpled leather.
[original]
I've been wanting to get better with zbrush recently so have started making a few tiling materials there and then decided to finish an asset fully in zbrush (I may have done this one other time). So far this is my progress.
My crits on it:
1) The decorations on the outside look lumpy. I think I have figured out why this was happening and could be equated to doing hairy lines, just I was doing it with trim dynamic. I was doing short jerky strokes, whereas strong smooth long strokes work better.
2) Not necessarily a fan of the texture on the book currently. May go closer to a more dimpled leather.
Replies
Could we see what you're basing your book off? what references are you using to obtain the look you're going with right now?
If I could critique on the design itself it's a little bland, there isn't much to the design of this book which will bring an artistically educated audience to the "wow" factor.
Because it's stylized, minimalism is a common trait to it but it doesn't mean the design should be dismissed.
Although adding design at this point now can be done so much later on in the pipeline thanks to miracle tools like Quixel Suite, Substance Painter/Designer which allow you to add on top of your normal map and cover previous mistakes (although you should always try to go back and fix mistakes any way)... I would say the hinges around the corners of your book are too large and come off a little distracting to me.
Because they're actual geometry I'm sorry to have to say this if you take on my criticism it does mean you'll have to go back and correct the geometry/UVs and rebake it (I always hate reading this part myself
Here are some reference images I've quickly found for you as a starter on design spec...
Keep going! Hope this helped
Thanks for the critique. I completely agree that it does need more and plan on having at least some damage, there really wasn't any initial concept just reference from some concept art and real books. I wanted relatively simple, something that would be overlooked because the symbol on it is the nordic rune of protection. Figured a flashy book would draw quite a bit of attention, but it is very bland so far and needs something more, maybe some inset designs like the books you posted and some damage.
@BEADEDMIKE
Some of the kind of awkward looking lighting at least might be attributed to the fact that for some reason the book when loaded into substance painter (seems to give me really clean normals typically, and the built in exploded baking is nice) is upside down. The Y plane is at the bottom of the sculpt and when loaded into max (did separate piece exports for the lock and book to do an exploded bake) are correctly oriented. That is a capture from substance's viewport so the camera's up is actually world down right now.
I definitely agree it needs more, and tonight will be seeing what I can accomplish in zbrush and rebake it. Really appreciate both of your crits.
hope this helps!
edit: after rereading your post sorry, if you have some pieces baked in substance and some in max, you may have to flip the channel manually in photoshop for the bakes out of max.
The camera is upside down. That may be why the shadows are on the top. Substance imported the model upside down. You see the model the correct way up, BUT to do so the camera is upside down currently. I baked solely in substance, just pulled the high's into max to name the different pieces to use substance's automatic explode by name.
To have world up be the same as camera up I need to rotate the image 180 degrees. So this technically is the accurate orientation of the world, but the book came in rotated 180 degrees (top of the book pointing down).
Correctly oriented camera, book rotated 180 degrees (came in like this).