Japanese Temple

UltraLrod

My practice with hand painting texture since everyone been doing them I gotten inspire by them. Been liking how I got it so far The texture seems quite flat. How can I push this to pop out, especially the roof. Excuse to greens too. There so many.

praetus

The first thing that I noticed about your scene was- holy crap! 25K tris? I'm not sure how you're wireframes are set up, and I'm assuming they're mainly in the bamboo stalks, but that is waaaay too much. There isn't much to your scene yet, but I would really focus on pushing your silhouettes. Right now most of your objects are very straight with little character to them. The torii is very plane right now. Exaggerate those shapes more and don't be afraid for the shapes to flair out. Before you focus on the textures I think you need to makes the shapes interesting.

ASGUARDVIKING

Definitely do what Praetus said and then use some textures to make the scene better. cgtextures.com and texturemate.com are two of them. By hoe many triangles ya have i think ya should be able to optimize your meshes and remove a lot of those.

UltraLrod

Rework the models. Yeah, most of the poly count came from the bamboo. After taking those out and just using plain cylinder to represent the bamboo it reduced the major amount of polys.

UltraLrod

Textures added. Definitely looks nice with the photos added. Haven't added the red wood texture for the Torii Gate yet but I'm not quite sure if I am doing it right. I apparently just grabbed the images from the site, e.g. cgtexture, and pasted them into my images. Should I have adjusted the images around to them appear unnoticeable from where I got them? The roof also texture also seems to created the opposite effect of the image when I flip the model. How would I go about fixing that? I also notice that I have bad pre-planning as you can notice that from the images since I forgot the bamboo leaves. How do you guys go about the pre-planning stage as you guys are gathering resources for your ideas?

ASGUARDVIKING

Can you post your texture maps so i/we can help better?

UltraLrod

My texture map

ASGUARDVIKING

Ok cool, a few things i notice is that your stairs have almost the same UV texture space as your box terrain ill call it. Thats not good considering that box plane is large and the main thing that will be seen first so the texture being blurred will have a negative effect on the composition of the piece. Also the images ya have on the terrain box are to large ya need to scale them down so they look a little more natural, and im not sure of those ground textures are tileable so ya may have to fix that.

Also your UV technique is to separated, ya should have the base of the house be one long wall UV so the texture will be easy to paint and there be no seams. Also the items in your scene that are important give them more UV space like the terrain and the house. One idea for ya, why have them all be on one UV? Give them their own separate UV. I've learned thats how its mostly done anyway everything is in separate pieces and not one mesh in the same UV.

Hope my babbling made since or helps had a little much of mead.

TheRealFroman

Hey there So I noticed you've included the ground UV's into your UV map for everything. You shouldnt do this. Instead, you can make a 1024x1024 tileable ground texture material in photoshop, and tile that over the ground instead. Also, work with something called Material ID's, they are really handy when working with set piece environment stuff such as this. Here's an example tutorial on how to use them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNMxO4VDcwA

If you think it's no good,, there is always tons of other stuff out there to learn from hehe.

Basically its like making separate tileable textures and applying them on specific geometry faces of your choosing. So for instance, the roof tiles could be one texture, all the wood is another, then the bamboo, the ground, etc. The size of each texture map can be anything you'd like, but for the most detail, go for 1024x1024 or 512x512.

In the unwrap / UV-ing phase of your project, you can just stretch out the size of your UV faces with tileable textures on them until the size of the pixel ratio (size of the texture covering the models) for them in the 3D engine looks realistic. Also, when modelling and texturing things, get tons and tons of references. Like over 50 +

That way, you can have some really good images on hand to guide your artistic vision for your project and make things look awesome ^^

But yeah, be sure to keep at this!!

UltraLrod

ASGUARDVIKING - I was taught to put everything into a 0-1 UV space, but never understood when it comes to having so many objects that need better quality over others. Having said giving them their own UVs, I would assume that making another texture make it 1024x1024 and having all the secondary props added there would be better then what I have at the moment. The texture I have now is 2048x2048 which I planned to reduce down to 1024x1024. So the send texture map will be reduce to 512x512.

TheRealFroman - Wouldn't the tileable texture still be flipped since the model in the scene was duplicated and flipped? Apparently that is what is happening in the scene. I'll get a close up shot of the temple when I get home. I actually liked that Material ID. Since I'm currently using Maya for the modeling, guess I'll have to dig around to that out. Unless someone on here knows how to do it in Maya. I would greatly appreciate it. As for reference images, that is one of the major thing I found out about doing this project. You can never have enough reference. I found myself looking on the website typing in the same words whether I'm look for texture or how it is made.

ASGUARDVIKING

Yeah i was where you are now a year and a half ago so i understand. Unless ya are adding this to a game engine i would say the terrain and house be fine at 1024 and everything else at 512. I would definitely have every object have its own UV. here are a few links for ya, and a real terrain tutorial for ya if ya have the time it would add a lot.

http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?cid=9999&swid=5

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/store/category/167/Free-Maya-Tutorials

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONm2iX5TscE

Oh if the texture is tileable when ya mirror it there wont be much of any problem.

UltraLrod

The texture is reverse when I duplicate the model and put it on the negative scale. Is the problem in my model or the texture itself?



Here is my current UVs set up

ASGUARDVIKING

Ok man from what i can see of the texture nothing really looks wrong. But from what i can see ya might have the whole house in that one UV. I would have the roof in its own here is a link for a little maya game UV'ing.

http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?pid=107&autoplay=1

Let me know if ya have any questions dude.

UltraLrod

Back with and update of my model. Sorry it took a while. Excuse the plane. It's there to represent the bamboo leaf that I will add onto.

UltraLrod

Rework the textures, but I'm having an issue with the alpha channel. I am trying to make an alpha channel for my bamboo leaf while keeping the rest of model solid. I did it with a psd file and a tga file, but the result keeps coming up as below. I don't know if it's an issue with Maya or my layers in Maya. Does anyone know the issue that is happening. I searched through the forum and found an similar issue, but wasn't able to solve the problem.

UltraLrod

Finish product. I couldn't find away around the transparency problem I was having. A friend suggested I put it on a different material with the same texture map. I don't know if it's viable but works out.

sybrix

You may want to check out the Polycount wiki on how to use tileable textures for your next scene, instead of packing everything into 0 - 1 uv space, which is usually used only for characters or unique props. Also for practice maybe you can get this into a game engine, a lot of the display problems in max/maya sometimes aren't an issue after you export your assets into the engine. UDK also has a terrain editor so you can build some ground, right now the flat block with grass isn't very convincing. For such a flat base I would expect the temple to be on a flat stone courtyard or something.

Good luck, keep on going!

UltraLrod

@sybrix. Thanks for the tip. I will go back and change base texture. It definitely doesn't give off that environmental feeling.

I took the chance and threw it into Marmoset and played around with it. Nothing too advance since it's my first time using the program. I was able to tweak the alpha setting in Marmoset, but the leaf started to disappear. I'm not sure if it's my texture map. Does anyone know why?