Trying to nail the "feel" of hand painted environment

Notes

Hey you hand painting guys out there...I was wondering if you guys can help me out on hand painting an entire environment...this chandelier was the style I was going for...this seemed easy enough to hand paint taking into consideration only a single light source on a single item...

I had also wondered if a spec map is needed for hand painted textures or was the spec "faked" and painted onto the diffuse already.
Or if normals are used as well or an AO map is simply overlaid ontop the Diffuse.

On that note, the scene below is what i was reffering to...

I had follow the same painting process as I did with the chandelier earlier but maybe I missed a key understanding to the hand painted texture process.
The material setup in udk is super simple with tpages plugged into their corresponding nodes..ie Diffuse tpage to Diffuse slot.

But this was the concept im working from


Thanks in advance

odium

I think with the hand painted stuff, the biggest issue is that of perspective. All paintings, drawings etc are drawn from a single perspective, but a realtime scene that you can move around in, thats different. So the problem always boils down to edgework. There are a lot of shaders that can mimic the brushstroke effect at edges though.

Looking at your model above, the first thing that hit me was your nomal isn't showing up at all. As for the scene, your lighting is far too blunt, it needs softening up and blending, to match the overall tone of the concept.

Impala88

tbh it depends what hand painted style you want to go for. I'm not really any kind of expert on it, but from the various games i've seen and played hand painted works well both with either no spec or normals as one style and with spec and normals as another style.

WoW: handpainted diffuse, no specific spec and no normal, lighting is usually baked into the diffuse, although there's no specific lighting direction in WoW neither does it have a very obvious baked AO.
Darksiders/dishonored: hand painted diffuse, matching spec and normal, all the usual baked AO and a little bit of baked lighting in places i think.

Owl

I agree with Impala88. It really does depend on what style of handpainted you're going for and also how you want your lighting to work. If you want a bunch of dynamic lighting in your scene, you probably should have normals and spec maps, so that you can see the lighting effecting the items. If you are making, on the other hand something like a fixed camera, ie. side scroller/topdown where your lighting will always be seen from one direction you could get away with a lot more, being able to paint your lighting all in straight on your diffuse and use Dynamic type lights or idexed lights that only effect selected objects or players.

Ultimately, with any style of hand painted props, you need to get good at painting really nice shading, lighting and colors and be able to paint forms well. That's your starting point, from there you can decide whether or not you also want normals or not.

You also could do a combination of both, some things only diffuse, some things with normal maps. Borderlands 2 did this to a pretty great effect. They also did high poly bakes to start there diffuse, which is an interesting way to do it too.

Notes

Thanks for the feedback guys...
Working with the light source within engine and trying to paint the textures was a problem I never did resolve. I think I might try to just only have one directional light and work off of that.

@Impala88 and Owl- I'll pick on direction on the "style" and go from there...I think I was trying different processes here and they didn't mesh well.

@odium- I didn't notice it as much but i'll go back to check on the normals as well as shaders that will mimic the brushstroke edges...im sure its just a matter of working with the emissive channel...

jsargent

I love that concept, what/ who is it from? Your scene has some nice elements, I would look at softening some of the colours and shapes.

Notes

The concept is from Artyom Vlaskin....I really like his concepts...they have great silhouettes, shapes, and are really planned out.

Burnova

I really think you did well matching the colors, but it will probably be impossible match the exact look unless you match the lighting. I think the scene looks really clean, which could be a good thing if its what you were intending... but I think you were going more for the look of the painting.

PhoenixWolf

i would try to match the colors and values a bit more and your windows need more texture and environmental details like in the concept and the back gound needs a bit of love

BTolputt

As I'm also working on my "hand painted look", this should be an interesting thread... subscribed

Notes

PhoenixWolf wrote: »

i would try to match the colors and values a bit more and your windows need more texture and environmental details like in the concept and the back gound needs a bit of love

Thats what I didnt do! I didn't really focus on defining the materials like in the concept...thanks...

pixelb

Looks like you need a good skylight. There's also way too much value contrast between the various stone textures in your scene. In the concept, the stone is *mostly* the same shade; color and brightness are is determined by the lighting.