Hand Painted Texture Work

njc6425

Hey everyone, recently ive been really getting into hand painted texture work for environments and characters, mainly from looking at diablo 3 and also from reading Jess's posts here on PCount. So i thought id start my own post because im struggling alot and would love some feedback, im also looking to get some of these textures to portfolio level quality. Some will be abandoned works which werent doing it for me, others will be completed stuff that im not happy with haha. so here are some images.

First attempt at a stone texture, Looks like chocolate
[IMG][/img]

First wood attempt
[IMG][/img]

3mnths later, stone texture (looks like metal blocks)
[IMG][/img]

And another stone texture. Not happy with my work method for this one so i stopped working on it but its a nice look at a half way
[IMG][/img]

Crits and comments and any advice most welcome guys!!!

AlanSMitchell

take a step back, and look at wood and all these materials you are creating how does light hit it. Where are the solid planes does it have a quick falloff does it have a bevel? how can you tell? for instance wood has grains....you have it cracked. also try not to paint with black lines let the mind fill in those spots for you with color variation. open up a wood.jpg doc and color pick, create a pallete and then keep the refference up when you paint. these are my suggestions I haven't digitally painted recently but this should help.

Valandar

Also for the wood - wood that is old enough to crack like that is very often also a LOT less saturated in color - very close to grey, though not fully grey.

njc6425

so i have done a couple more textures, only happy with one but ill post both haha.

stone texture (arrangmenet due to UVs)
[IMG][/img]

cannon texture
[IMG][/img]

I was really happy with the wood texture but then i started adding too much and i couldnt undo haha.. About to start prototyping for a 20week assignment next week, 4 weeks of prototyping the game, which will then get judged....if we pitch it right then we get to make it, if not then i have to help another team at my school. So with this in mind my attention to my texture work may be slacking haha, also ontop of that i just got some new zbrush books so yeh busy busy, ill post a link to some other threads of mine for those who are keen

Blaisoid

your stones look very metallic. edge wear is too strong and too even, also tiles have too much contrast. lack of color obviously increases the metal feel.

btw, i don't think there's a point in making a bunch of different textures if the only difference is small cracks etc. when brush strokes are the same in all of them it will still feel like you're using one texture.

nullfed

I agree with Blaisoid in that there is a lot of repetition within the texture. If you are copying features of your wood or stones into other areas, then you are using up texture space unnecessarily.

The wood on your cannon texture has obvious re-use. Instead of filling that whole wood area with similar details, you could use that space to give more resolution.

With your stone texture,arranged according to your UVs, there is lots of wated space obviously, but the stones you include are copies. The UVs are the problem here - you could use a single tiling texture and have every side of the cube look different.


The actual tecniques you use to create your textures is a different issue, really. If you are looking for an approach that makes sense:
You mentioned using zbrush. When you see a zbrush sculpt and people offering comments on it, a common issue is that people move into highly subdivided levels too quickly, the geometry becomes lumpy as a result because the underlying layers haven't got the definition they need. You should get every level looking as good as possible before moving into a higher subdivision. There is a similar way of working with hand painting.
On your textures, such as the cannon wood, there's lots of high frequency detail but not much in the way of larger underlying forms.

start with a simple basic colour, add some large details and then refine into the smaller details that make the texture pop. Here's a really quick example, there are others if you search the forum:











This is obviously very quick and by no means finished, but it was quick and would serve as a decent level of detail to get the texure on a model, look at it and go 'yeah, I need some more detail here, and here'. you can always go back to it and refine.
With hand painted stuff it can feel quite laborious and its tempting to copy details around as a short cut. This can work but often, you'll see the same details catching your eye. If you approach it simply, there's no need for the process to take too long.

post more and get tips

njc6425

Thanks so much for the crits and comments guys and thanks for the example @nullfed it really helps to have a visual ref Ill try do some more today if i have time and post them up, i really wanna get better at hand painted texturing because it is by far my favourite art style.

Early days yet but thanks again

vcortis

Hey I don't have time for a lengthy reply right now, but hand-painting textures is something I did at my last job a lot. A good place to get started is this tutorial...

http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm

It'll explain a lot of the basics of painting in general. Using that methodology and looking at some good reference (Blizzard textures or do a search here) you should get some better results.

Good Luck!

Edit: Oh! Also take your time, the first good hand painted texture I made took me 16+ hours to paint! I'm obviously much faster now, but when you're learning it's best not to rush it!

daphz

I think you should tone down the contrast between your highlights and shadows, concentrate on getting the big/medium shapes in place before worrying about the small cracks and stuff. There are some really nice examples of stone and wood in this thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=82211
keep at it man! and vcortis is right, paintin texture takes time, lots of time.

njc6425

Wow both those links are awesome!!!!! been reading through that link @vcortis and there is so much information and tips, its great!!! thanks!!! had some time yesterday so i thought, rather than go off of photo ref and what not id try and copy someone elses texturing, by means of attempting to duplicate i hope to learn a bit more as well so here is my concrete skirting board copied off of a diablo 3 texture sheet
[IMG][/img]

The rest is so empty because there are other materials in the texture that i was referencing that i hope to copy too

njc6425

did a wood texture, probably the best ive done but still not happy with it, definatly getting there i think though

[IMG][/img]

frostraver

It's getting better indeed keep practicing! Only thing I can say is that there's little depth in the cord around the wooden plank. Maybe put some more texture in the cord itself would fix it

njc6425

im gonna redo the wood, not happy with it, i like how i managed to get a nice texture with the concrete skirting board while still retaining that hand painted look, wanna achieve that with the wood texture too...

thanks for the kind words

Samfisher84

cool love that handpainted stuff!

ivanzu

This guy has some nice tutorials.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Gilesruscoe

njc6425

thanks for the link and kind words practise makes perfect