Hand-painted Wells
polycounter lvl 10
Hey guys! I am going to try hand-painting textures on some low-poly wells here. I've done some hand-painting on a couple props before, but I had really small texture sizes so this time I'm gonna give myself a little more room and make it look nice for port 
I'm going for WoW style proportions, textures, and colors. Also, this will be my first attempt at tileable textures, so here goes haha. Here's a sheet of concepts I came up with, as well as the 3 I've chosen to go with (the two with green dots and that one single image):
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Here are my models, created in 3ds Max. They are not exact replicas of my concepts, as I was kindof working on designing as I went haha:
443 tris:
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866 tris:
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820 tris:
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So the plan is to do these wells in order from top to bottom (least favorite to favorite design, heh). I'm hoping they get successively better as I learn from each one!
Crits and comments on concepts and models appreciated. Next step is the unwrap on the first well.
Thanks!
Jessica
I'm going for WoW style proportions, textures, and colors. Also, this will be my first attempt at tileable textures, so here goes haha. Here's a sheet of concepts I came up with, as well as the 3 I've chosen to go with (the two with green dots and that one single image):
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Here are my models, created in 3ds Max. They are not exact replicas of my concepts, as I was kindof working on designing as I went haha:
443 tris:
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
866 tris:
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820 tris:
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So the plan is to do these wells in order from top to bottom (least favorite to favorite design, heh). I'm hoping they get successively better as I learn from each one!
Crits and comments on concepts and models appreciated. Next step is the unwrap on the first well.
Thanks!
Jessica
Replies
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Thanks!
Jessica
also use more polies, this is 2011
its only straight lines right now, which doesnt give muhc character (or life) to the model
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For example: if you making this well for 1st/3rd person game, then your polycount is quite low. If its for some top-down perspective game, RTS or something, then 512 or 256 texture will be fine, but you might want to change your design completely, because player will be seeing only this massive roof, which is not that interesting really.
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Critique and comments welcome!
You can get a much higher rez looking image with using tiling texture sheets.
Also, is there a reason why the object is so low poly? Sure, this forum loves low poly stuff, but why not make it a high caliber hand-painted project that will make it stand out amongst the hundreds of other hand-painted projects you see?
The nice thing about using tiling textures if you can have a total shit UV sheet so long as the final product looks good.
What I do understand is how to make the tileable texture itself, but then my question is - what to do with it? Do I still layout my uv's like I regularly would if I were going to be painting everything uniquely? Or do I stack as many shells as I can? (which is what I did) Why do you say to make it 256 x 256? I was just going to make some tileable sheets that were square-shaped and duplicate them around in my uvw sheet up there. I didn't know the dimensions of the tileable texture mattered.
Or do you mean that I should have several different uvw sheets, each filled with their own tileable texture, on top of which I stack the pieces that belong to that material?
Or do you mean that I should create several tileable textures, each 256 x 256 (or rectangular as you said I might have to in some cases), then arrange them all into one final uvw sheet? And then unwrap and stack my uv's into the textures? In that case, would I just eyeball where to stack my shells? Like, 'oh, that looks like about 256 x 256 pixels right here, where my cobblestone texture is going to be'. Am I making sense?
Consider this. You're making a portfolio piece. You need to make it look good on its own. Noone will be imagining your well within some larger environment. So, if you doing it for some 1st person game, spend time to polish you mesh. Add more triangles, play with forms. Right now its still blocky and not so interesting really. Textures might fix it, but there is no reason for not trying to support it with silhouette.
ask yourself, do you need that many pixels for the amount of detail you're putting into it?
generally, when people put 'hand painted' in the title of the thread, they mean WoW style. Which does not need that much space. by all means, use whatever size you want for a portfolio piece, but keep in mind that if you're not using the full potential of those 1024x1024 pixels [which is a lot of pixels to paint!] it can ruin the piece in an employers eye.
at the end of this, try reducing the size and see what is lost. keep reducing until there's a significant loss in quality. this will help you when next you have to decide what size the DIF should be.
It's nice to see the variation in the designs, seems your bridging two cultures?
Pretty clean and efficient model with a good uv to boot. Cant wait to see your texture.
Hopefully this helps you some. This is how we made 99% of all the environment art in Infamous 2! Hell, pretty much any environment in any game uses this. It lets you get assets looking really high res with some basic 256 or 512 maps. Of course, in-house shaders with some more features like strong vertex color support with height maps does a lot of the work.
edit: this is a redundant statement.
look, what i meant is that you should give it more polies so you could diverse the silhouettes.
with those newly added verts you could pull some of the edges of the roof down, making it look less mirrored and more generic.
If you're going to treat your UVs that will use a tileable texture the same way you treat a unique asset, there's really no point in using a tileable texture.
When you create a tileable brick wall texture, for example, that will repeat indefinitely within you UV editor. If you unwrap the wall model that will use said texture, regardless of where your UV islands are, you're always going to get nice, tiling bricks.
Because of this fact, UV location is largely irrelevant. If you're using a very small texture sheet (like 256), to get that nice, crisp look, you scale those UVs up until both the proportions of the objects on the sheet (such as the bricks) and the texture quality look correct.
Keep in mind that the more you scale, the more your tiling the texture, which means the more obvious the tiling becomes. Using decals and/or vertex colors is a good way of making the tiling less obvious.
Looking back at Haiasi's example, you can see he has overlapping UVs and UVs that go off the texture. Why? Because as he pointed out, he wanted specific details from the texture on those areas of his mesh. Sometimes you'll need to really plan out how your tileable texture will function and what areas you can re-use to give your asset a unique look.
Tileable textures give you a lot of freedom with what you can do. You can get creative and rotate,scale, and manipulate your UVs to give the appearance of a uniquely textured asset, when you're really using the same textures that's all over the rest of the model.
My advice would be to simply grab a tileable photo source from cgtextures, etc and mess around with the UVs. From there you can plan a bit better how you want your textures for this project. Or just dive in with the project and ask about any problems you have. Either way, you'll eventually realize how simple it is.
With textures that have a 2:1 or 4:1 or 1:2 1:4 ratio (like the concrete I showed, pretty close to a 1:2 ratio), you're going to have to select your UV shells and scale it by 50% horizontally. This is because the texture try to fill the 0 to 1 space in the UV editor, so to counter-act that, you need to squish your UVs.
It's kind of hard to explain in text, if you follow my little tutorial it should scream out as obvious to you that the texture is stretching one way or another. Just squish the UV shell horizontally by 50%
One thing you were concerned about and that no one seemed to mention is extra verts due to splitting faces apart for uv mapping/tiling. It's a legitimate concern, something you should keep in mind. (try not to split in the middle of smoothing groups)
But in this case it doesn't matter. From the renders it looks like each face of the well base and top have different smoothing groups (hence the sharp edges). So even though your verts are welded (in 3d program) in most games they will be split anyway, to keep the smoothing groups. Some games (like Doom3) require meshes actually be split (Doom3 only uses 1 smoothing group, so the modeler has to force splits for sharp edges - Hammer uses smoothing groups successfully, and the exporter doesn't split faces, but in game it's the same thing)
But I like the concepts a lot, I also like the 'weird' one. Just has a lot of personality, could be an old tree hanging over the well or something, which would probably work well in that game you were making props for awhile back.
I'm sure if you search the forums for tiling, hand painted, etc.. you will find some good examples. I do remember one guy working on a Wow house, and i think he was using a tiled texture to the rooftiles and whatnot.
The one thing to really consider whether or not you tile can be engine and/or draw calls. Very basically a draw call is the engine rendering a texture once. More is more expensive.
So if you have the well all on one texture it will be one draw call in game. Great optimizing.
If you use 4 different materials (rooftiles, stone, metal, wood) it will be 4 drawcalls. Not so good.
BUT, it depends on the engine too. Some engines will combine similar textures in an area (so a house roof and a well roof get combined into one draw call instead of 2). Things like this make it hard to fully optimize models for many engines, but most of the time you are doing something for a specific engine so that's all that counts.
Probably the biggest thing for a portfolio is maybe show at least one model of each style.
A specific model texture, and a model using base assets. Showing that you understand and are capable of both options is probably a plus, then the dev would know you are ready for whatever style they are using.
Halasi, I deeply appreciate the tutorial. Some of what you have explained I don't fully understand yet, but I think I will get it if I take it step by step.
Thanks for the explanation about the uv's Bunglo! In conjunction with what Halasi showed, I think I'm starting to get a better idea of how it's all supposed to be laid out.
I understand what you're saying about the vert count Baddcog - thanks for answering that. I will be sure to continue looking up examples of tiling and hand-painting here. As for what you are saying about the draw-calls, if I do the tiling method, do you mean I will be using a couple different material id's/texture sheets? They are not all arranged into one big texture sheet? In any case, I like your advice about trying both methods - I think I will try tiling 2 of these wells just so I can learn how to do that, and perhaps one of the wells I will texture uniquely. And yeah, I did stop 3d for a couple months to work on some 2d stuff and a character concept for a competition that never happened
Anyway, I reworked the concept. Third time's the charm?? :
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And the model - 1012 tris
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From what I have deduced, I ought to start working on making some tileable texture sheets now - uv's for later. Photoshop, here I come! Critique and comments welcome.
p.s. If enough people like that weird well I drew I might just have to make it sometime ahaha
The final product is what matters. If it looks good in the view port, that's what the player sees!
especially in handpainted / ciomic looks you have to exaggerate a lot...
If you notice on the sides of the wall piece, the bricks are modeled out a little bit. Save details like that for the very last step so you don't have to UV anything more complex than basic cubes.
Here are my prospective colors. I plan on four main tileables: wood plank, cobblestone, stone slab, and fish scale roof tiles. For the other random parts of the mesh, like the little bucket, metal lantern, and well chain, how would I approach that? A separate, small uv sheet for them? If that's the case, I might model out some of those planties and pebbles in my concept too to help fill up uv space.
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Critique and comments welcome.
Totally agree with linkov, do your best and dont worry about the tri count! looking foward to see more, I'm also doing some tests with handpainted textures
For the draw calls, every texture will create one more. Dan's example is a great way to get 2 tiling textures on one sheet (aka 1 drawcall). It's great for objects that share a very common look. I could see that used on many objects in a temple/ruins scene. Or you could have the top and bottom on seperate sheets which would create and additional drawcall.
The bonus to two sheets is it would be easier to use the cobbles on a wider variety of stuff, like large floors or walls and not worry about the details being there. it also would have room for more cobbles, so less noticable tiling.
For your small items it depends.Having them on one and saving drawcalls is good. But say you use those props all over the place in your map. Grass everywhere but bucket only at well. Then being in a seperate part of the map that wouldn't need the bucket rendered would be a waste of GPU memory to have it loaded. (probably nothing to worry about really, it's only a few pixels...)
But still, it might be best to have a small grass tex and a small bucket. it would cost more drawcalls but only when both are in the same scene.
On the other hand you could probably have one texture sheet with 20 small props on it that are all used a lot, and it would be better than 20 small textures.
However, lol (there are so many choices), I'd keep transparencies on one sheet, and non-transparencies on another. Alpha overdraw is expensive, so you don't want to have 20 small objects that are on a sheet with transparency if you don't need to.
Do post the game, would like to see it.
Here is my tileable wood texture for the edges of the roof. Did I make too many planks? Too few? Does it matter? It's 512 for now, but since I'm gonna have about 5 different texture sheets, should they each not be more than 256? Working on stone slab texture next. Critique and comments welcome:
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Here it is, shown tiling.
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It depends. Right now your texture is great if you gonna use it to texture floors, ceilings, some wooden stuff in general. But if you making it only to texture this well, I guess it could use more specific approach.
very pleased to see that it's not stylized in the typical way everyone paints now-a-days. has your own flavor to it.
personally, i think you're a tad too far into the green spectrum for my tastes.
looks like you might have gone a bit overboard if it's just for that trim :poly124:
But with that you could texture trim on five different objects and use 5 different planks and you'd have good variety. Plus use it for a floor as well.
Right now I am really struggling with the stone texture though. This particular tileable is the one I'm gonna use for the roof supports, pillar bases, and well platform:
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This is my first attempt, shown tiling. It looks like bathroom tiles ]:<
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This is my current attempt. Now it looks like destroyed bathroom tiles ]:<
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Here it is, shown tiling:
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So yeah, I am not really happy with this. Originally I wanted it to be plain stone without cuts, but then I thought that would be boring since I can't even paint in edge-wear on any of the objects (since these textures are tileable and if I paint in wear then it will be everywhere!) But then the problem with having these cuts is that they might show up on the pillar bases and roof supports (which I don't want), unless I shrink those shells pretty small to avoid the cuts. If any of that made sense.
I feel like I should make two different tileable textures - one completely smooth stone for the pillar bases and roof supports, and one cut stone for the well platform. Then I can work on making this particular texture less 'square' and more random, without having to worry about the cuts crisscrossing the pillar bases and roof support meshes.
Maybe I just answered my own questions... Thoughts?
- paint texture for your largest piece and then fit smaller pieces somehow. (thats kinda lazy, but sometimes can be an option)
and another one is
- think what you need for your small pieces and then find a way to incorporate these elements into the texture you'll be using for the largest piece.
for examle (and I think its quite obvious) - your stone texture right now consists of only ONE tile. Make it four. or nine. And from there you can make some of the tiles smooth without any damage. This will solve two things:
- break up the repetition
- you can have pieces for your other needs
Just to clarify though, I am okay with the pillar bases and roof supports having damage, just not tile-like cuts/divisions. They are supposed to be single, solid pieces of stone, whereas the well platform is made out of many:
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The stone texture on the bottom is leagues better than the first one. If it's going to be used on the ground watch the harsh lighting baked into the top. You might want to scale that down some. Tone some of the chips down too if you want. It should read fine if you put enough detail onto the surface.