First post, first try at hand-painting

Ledi

Hi all,

finally got the courage up to make an account and post on these forums - I'm a game art student and my tutor has been at everyone in the class to get on here for at least the last year.

My current assignment is an exterior environment, I chose a duck pond (not that there's any ducks on it). I just finished the photo-ref version and I'm now working on a hand-painted one.

After several hours of frustration over grass (that file got trashed) I went to bed, but was up again an hour later with inspiration for some slightly rocky ground. This is for a path of sorts that will divide the small island and lead over a bridge.



I debated whether to try for a smooth painting style or a rougher one, I think I'm enjoying the freedom that I get with the slightly rougher brushes.

Comments and suggestions to improve are welcome! When I wake up again I'll post the wireframe of the duck pond so that there's some context to where these textures will be applied.

Selaznog

Looking good so far! As for the grass, I feel your pain....I've tried doing hand painted grass textures dozens of times, scrapping each one. Unfortunately, I think the only way to make a convincing flat grass texture is to have very rough generic brush strokes. Check out Diablo 3:
http://lancastria.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/diablo3_2_lancastria.jpg
Where they dont have grass alpha cards, the texture is fairly muddy, and each blade is just a quick short brush stroke.
I found my best grass was actually clovers, as they read better than grass does from top down. Check out Jessicas grass as well for inspiration: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=87797&page=18



As for the texture you have now, it looks good, but I would make it twice as big and have the pebbles a bit more sparse. Having a bigger texture (or just shrinking the details on this by half) will add more variety when you tile it. Alternatively, you could have another texture that's mainly sand and 2-4 pebbles, and blend that together.

And for the future, I'd stay away from having black in the shadows...Try picking a cool tone. For a duck pond, you could pick a nice dark aqua colour for the shadows

Ledi

Thanks for the input, after a good sleep I went back to it and yeah... those rocks are way too big. I looked at Jessica's work. The lancastria link takes me to a 403 forbidden page, so I couldn't look at that.

Here's another piece from today, working on the base of the rock one (without the rocks).



I'm happy enough with it to start adding some pebbles back in. The shadows were originally blue on a multiply layer, but the colour seems to have gotten lost.

Here's the scene I'm working on, it's 4999 tris (of a 5k budget).



Edit: And a version with lil' rockies.



Edit Edit: I don't know how frowny this forum is on double posting, so here's another addition; grass. Worked much better than my first attempt! Those are the tilable textures, the rest are packed onto one map.



I only have a week to finish this, so I'm in a bit of panic mode. Especially as I also need to re-unwrap the photo-ref version due to too much open space. >>;

Ledi

Here's how it's looking on the mesh at the moment, I know the colours are a bit out of whack but there'll definitely be an overall balancing step taken when the other textures are blocked in. In particular the balance between the grass and the tree leaves needs to be tweaked as the grass is overbearing the entire scene (although both alpha blending and filling in the large areas of white will change that somewhat I know).

Jeff Parrott

I like the initial grass but you could probably take another pass at it. The dirt path works. But it shouldn't carry over the bridge. Make that a different surface.

m1neh

Not much of a hand paint guru, but how many of those 4,999 tris have you thrown into that bench? Also the bench looks a bit small but that might just be me...

Jeff is right about the dirt path, any way you could blend it in? Is this going to be in engine? If so get it in right away and put in lighting so you can balance the colours in the right environment.

Otherwise, I like the low poly modelling, and artful placement of the rocks...

Ledi

Would something like this be a better idea for over the bridge?



The scene's going to be put together in Unity, I have a friend who's helping me with the alpha blend shader for the grass/dirt blending, but Strumpy hasn't updated for Unity 4 yet.

That's the main reason I haven't tweaked the colour balance overall yet, waiting for it to get into engine.

Starting work on more bits now, probably the tree branches and the bridge first.

Thanks for the comments, guys. It's really helping.

Jessica Dinh

Ahh, I wouldn't go by my grass haha! I've yet to paint some grass I'm happy with, it's such a hard texture to tackle. Here's a really great example though, by polycounter TelekineticFrog.

Ledi

Jessica Dinh wrote: »

Ahh, I wouldn't go by my grass haha! I've yet to paint some grass I'm happy with, it's such a hard texture to tackle. Here's a really great example though, by polycounter TelekineticFrog.

Yeah, I saw that one and tried to emulate something like it, but... it ended up looking like a hedgehog had stumbled into green paint and rolled around on screen. >> If I get time I might try another grass but there's so much to do for this assignment this grass might end up sticking. Yours looks great too though!

Did a little tweaking and just took the props into mudbox so I could do some on-model painting to line up seams.

Ledi

Update before heading to bed, today was mainly working on the bridge.



Also moved it into Unity (free) so that the colours are accurate for tweaking. Ended up darkening the road a bit for now so that it wasn't overbright.

Ledi

Another quick update, been working on the bridge and tree today. A programmer friend of mine wrote the alpha blend shader for me so I could break up the grass. The tree is still heavily in progress.



The colours are coming together a bit better since I created a colour key, I'm looking at an overall desaturated colour scene as it invokes memories of watercolours and older paintings. Kind of peaceful, I think.

m1neh

Hey, the vertex blending is helping with the ground there. Although I would suggest having more grass more abundant on the flatter ground, and make it more muddy as it goes down the side of the bank, also potentially blend it all down to the pond bed?

Have you got any lights in the scene yet?

Ledi

Thanks M1neh, will continue tweaking the alpha for grass distribution. This was mostly a "hey, does it work" pass. XD

The scene is actually going to be unlit - it's got mobile specs and when I discussed it with my tutor he agreed that I didn't need to put in lights. I may put in one light to create shadows but I can't do that in Unity Free. If it looks too strange I might light it, though, and I'll definitely bow to those with superior knowledge of composition than I if you all believe that lit would look better.

Spent today on the tree trunk and banging my head on the rocks. Because they're smooth landscaping rocks there's very little interest that I can pick on to emphasize (a lesson for me to take from this). Feeling a bit bleh today as I have 11 hours of work under my belt and feel like I have very little to show for it.

This is the tree trunk and the beginning of a rock trial, although I'm really not sure what to do with them. I did research for various hand painted rocks and tilables but I'm still kind of lost. Going to push on with the cracks across the main body and see how they look when shaded in.

Ledi

Worked on the rocks a lot more today, getting a bit happier with the direction they're going (ditched the last idea with the cracks). Also resurfaced the walking surface of the bridge, although there's a seam I still need to fix and I'll probably tighten the small stones up slightly. I played with the idea of putting moss on the bridge and road, but so far my implementations of the idea haven't worked out. Please ignore the rocks in this screen, they're very, very WIP. Haven't re-done the alpha map for blending yet either, but it's on the to do list!




As always, comments and suggestions welcome! I've gotten some really useful advice from forum members so far, and am very grateful.

AimBiZ

Ledi wrote: »

Hi all,

finally got the courage up to make an account and post on these forums - I'm a game art student and my tutor has been at everyone in the class to get on here for at least the last year.

Are you a student at The Game Assembly by chance?

Things coming along fairly nice. Don't understand the muddy water. It kinda pops out in a bad way. Are you going to lit this scene later on? If not I'd suggest having a unifying color tone on the textures, like a greenish tint, since the grass would reflect that on everything. Keep it subtle though.

ToffeeApple

Hi

I'm really loving the stone texture on the bridge. I've just start trying to do hand painted textures myself - it definitely is hard to master! I do think you need to revisit the grass - I think the main issue is that it looks like it all flows in the same direction. I took a look at the example Jessica posted and if you look you can see that each blade leans in a different direction.

Ledi

Right, I need help, guys.

I've been trying so many different surfaces for the walkable area of the bridge, and none of them have worked. Traditionally the surface would be some form or brick or cobble, but the times I've tried to add them it makes the image too high frequency (see above). Dirt doesn't seem to suit it although so far it's the winning texture. I've tried larger stones, concrete and gravel as well.

What do you think would be best for the bridge surface? Examples or paintovers would be incredibly welcome.

AimBiZ

The dirt collecting between the bricks should be pretty bright. This should unify things as well.

OriginLinear

I am by no means an expert at hand painting textures, but the method I found worked for making grass was to paint in patches.

By that I mean paint a couple small patches of grass, and then duplicate and place them at random, rotating and so forth. Start by filling in the center area, offset, and then repeat to make it seamless. After that, it is just touch up and final details.

Ledi

This is my latest dirt try, I like it better than the other and it isn't as busy as the cobblestones, although I'm still not completely convinced (I'm also running out of time).

I also linked the capping stones of the bridge - a couple look a little wonky because of the angle of the camera in this shot. I lost some of the stoney roughness while matching the seams in Mudbox, need to go back over them to add a little variance.



@ AimBiz - No, I'm a TAFE student in South Australia. ^^ Also, the mud is the floor of the pond. Water will be added at the very end by a friend of mine, so right now it's empty.

@OriginLinear - The grass will probably be redone tomorrow as we were shown a new method today.

Oh, just remembered to mention: this isn't going to be a walkable environment - I'm recording a turnaround and handing it up that way. The first person controller is just an easier way to inspect things close up.

Ledi

I replaced the grass today - no more wavy lines. The mip-mapping is generating a lot of blurriness in both edit and game mode - it clears up when I turn it off and will probably be less noticeable in the actual build. I also finalised the dirt road for the bridge and connected the underside of the bridge together with bricks.



I plan to pull the alpha blend back a bit so that there's more grass is the grass/dirt ratio than seen above.

Tomorrow I tackle the rocks again.

m1neh

Hey,

Looking a lot better with the bridge floor imo.

If I were you, I would make the entire floor one mesh (including the bottom of the pond, and then use your current vertex blend and just make the pond mud and blend it into grass at the banks. I'd also make the bottom of the pond have some slight height variation, and get rid of the sharp edges around the bank, if you can spare the polys.

I personally think lighting would make it better, but you'd probably have to have spec maps for it to look good. It depends, if the object of the exercise is to create an unlit game environment, for handheld or something, then obviously you can't have lights...

Ledi

Hi again, I know it's been a while. Had to rush to get everything together, we're heading towards the end of term.

Here's the version which will (most likely) be uploaded. I'm still not too fond of the tree, but it was my first attempt at foliage of any type and I learned a lot while creating it.

Again, thank you to everyone for your comments and criticism. The scene wouldn't look as good without the feedback I received here.

Hand-painted Turnaround

There's also the photo-sourced version of the same scene I was developing at the same time.

Photo-sourced Turnaround

Ledi

Just a quick update now that I've had a bit more time to organise things - here are some stills of the hand painted duck pond from the Unity build.







And a collection of the props with their respective texture sheets.