I love it but I wish you could've gotten more texture detail out of it... it's so large the textures look a bit blurry. You are mirroring your UV's right? And using as much space as possible?
If you've already maximized your UV space I'd actually reduce the size a little bit just to make the textures look sharper.
Yes I'm mirroring the UVs both across x and z. But I agree that my textures are my weakest area. I'll post a texture shot tomorrow and hopefully you guys can point out what I'm doing wrong. Thanks for the criticism, it really helps!
OK, here's the texture. The other thing that came to my mind was that I'm painting at 1024x1024 and then downsize to 1024x512 to get the 2x1 aspect ratio (final game resolution for centaur's weapon is 256x128 ).
Well the texture and UV layout isn't that bad, but If you are going to UV for a 2:1 ratio, keep in mind that you want to use the important UV's and lay them horizontally so that you will use as much space as possible.
If I look at your texture you only use the overlays on the blade and skull. You may want to make some more contrast on the blade (skull and horn) so it will read better from a distance. That will bring out the horn and skull a lot better!
Hi Spudnik. The blade edge don't have much detail so i would scale that down in UV space and prioritize space for the cranium. I suggest that you also paint the texture in the right ratio to get more control and sharper textures, 1:2 in this case. If you do it like this
@Andyk125:
Really good point! I had considered scaling the UVs based on importance of the shell before but I kinda shied away from it because if you go to TOO low, the actual pixels will be visible, especially in the normal maps. There's a lot of the default heroes suffering from that as well :S But you're right, in this case I could have pushed it a bit further. I'll try to polish it up with the added contrast.
@Nannou:
I used to work like that earlier but I gave up on it because I had to constantly rebake and it just slowed down iteration so much. But now I'm much more confident in my baking so I'll definitely try it again! For this piece though, I'll just adjust the texture as Andyk125 suggested and not rebake since I have a really bad habit of not finishing anything -.- I'll definitely will use it for the next piece though!
Fantastic critiques guys, it's already helped me a ton! Keep it coming
Update on the Axe: Added some more definition in the skull area as you guys suggested. Discovered a weird new issue though, as you can see in the image: The lod1 blade gets some weird shading/color on the edges even though it's the exact same mesh :S Any ideas on that one?
Did you accidently deleted a wrong edge that screwed up your UV's from the weapon?
I think you need to cheack out your Uv's or maybe something screwed up your normals and you might want to reset those.
Hmm your having the same issue whith ingame view?
Maybe someone else can help you with it, because if the Uv's are still identical im stunned
Only thing that could be happened is the smoothing groups/normals are screwed up. Maybe import the model into marmoset or just with a plain white texture, it's easier to see if the normals are screwed up..
That was my initial idea, too. But that shouldn't be the problem either because it's the same geo. I mean, I literally do a duplicate of the blade in the lod0 and don't thouch it again T.T. If it was a normals issue, then it would show on the lod0 as well., Oh, and I forgot to mention, this happens only in the game, in Maya it looks fine:
Have you tried unlocking your normals? Sometimes your normals get messed up after modifying the topology in Maya, but it still looks ok until you unlock them. You'll have to do re-do any soft/hard edge definition though, but that should fix it.
Unlocking doesn't work either, unfortunately. I mean I'm using the EXACT SAME object for both blades, which works in one instance and not in the other. Even weirder: The visual bug only happens on the front side of the axe, not on the back (I tried turning the geo, didnt work either. I hesitate to say it's a textures issue because the line on the blade is not pixellated at all, but What other possible causes are there ?!
Looks like I should learn to read :P Didn't realize the meshes were duplicates. Does it work if you just use the same FBX file? Sounds like your LOD0 is already within the budget, so maybe that could count as your LOD1. Not sure I would add more polys to the skull area if it's causing this many issues.
Unfortunately the lod0 is over the budget for the lod1 But yeah, I tried using the blade piece from the lod0 (the blade, skull and handle are all separate floating geo) and even that caused the same issue O.o
So this whole axe business has got me in low spirits but here's the sculpt of Robobobo's Slardar weapon concept (which you can check out in his thread):
We decided to stay a bit truer to Slardar's original palette since the dark colors worked really well with the Cthulhu/creepy theme we had going. Overall pretty happy though it took me a day longer than I had hoped to finish because of poor planning and mistakes on my part Again, check out Robobobo's thread HERE.
Update on what is happening in this corner of the forums:
The importer is still buggy but I was finally able to get some previewer shots on a Void weapon Robobobo and I have been working on:
I've also been working on some ward concepts by the lovely beetrootChan:
spawn
It seems like it's some color bleed from the eyes on the texture but when I resize the image to game res, there's loads of space between the UV shells. The black bleeding into the eye, I can understand but the yellow bleeding into the black just baffles me. All of the masks are the same size in terms of the color islands. Any idea whats going on here?
By the way, are ward textures 256x256 or 512x512 at game res? The requirements page says 512, the ingame importer says 256...
Here's the textures at 512x512 and 256x256 respectively
EDIT:
Here's a Maya screengrab with the 256 textures. some of the seams are visible but none of the color bleeding happens... dafuq?!
I did, I usually add 5-15 pixels of padding. As you can see in the maya screencap at the bottom of my last post, none of that weird color bleeding is happening, and that's with 256x256 maps. The seems are barely visible, but none of the color bleeding. If you compare that to the ingame shot at the beginning of the last post, there;s a huge difference there that I can't explain...
Replies
WIP
Would love some tasty C&C
If you've already maximized your UV space I'd actually reduce the size a little bit just to make the textures look sharper.
OK, here's the texture. The other thing that came to my mind was that I'm painting at 1024x1024 and then downsize to 1024x512 to get the 2x1 aspect ratio (final game resolution for centaur's weapon is 256x128 ).
If I look at your texture you only use the overlays on the blade and skull. You may want to make some more contrast on the blade (skull and horn) so it will read better from a distance. That will bring out the horn and skull a lot better!
[ame="
, then export and bake in 1:1 ratio. When you have all your maps you just re-size them in Photoshop to 1:2 before you start texturing.
Really good point! I had considered scaling the UVs based on importance of the shell before but I kinda shied away from it because if you go to TOO low, the actual pixels will be visible, especially in the normal maps. There's a lot of the default heroes suffering from that as well :S But you're right, in this case I could have pushed it a bit further. I'll try to polish it up with the added contrast.
@Nannou:
I used to work like that earlier but I gave up on it because I had to constantly rebake and it just slowed down iteration so much. But now I'm much more confident in my baking so I'll definitely try it again! For this piece though, I'll just adjust the texture as Andyk125 suggested and not rebake since I have a really bad habit of not finishing anything -.- I'll definitely will use it for the next piece though!
Fantastic critiques guys, it's already helped me a ton! Keep it coming
Update on the Axe: Added some more definition in the skull area as you guys suggested. Discovered a weird new issue though, as you can see in the image: The lod1 blade gets some weird shading/color on the edges even though it's the exact same mesh :S Any ideas on that one?
I also reworked an older WR set of mine:
OLD:
NEW:
I think you need to cheack out your Uv's or maybe something screwed up your normals and you might want to reset those.
Maybe someone else can help you with it, because if the Uv's are still identical im stunned
Only thing that could be happened is the smoothing groups/normals are screwed up. Maybe import the model into marmoset or just with a plain white texture, it's easier to see if the normals are screwed up..
I'd try setting all normals on the entire model to set-to-face, then reapply them the way you did before including hardening the edges etc.
My only beef is with the tentacles, they should be smooth and blobbly instead of having that pinched spike at the top.
Color tests. What do you guys think, one of these or something completely different?
We decided to stay a bit truer to Slardar's original palette since the dark colors worked really well with the Cthulhu/creepy theme we had going. Overall pretty happy though it took me a day longer than I had hoped to finish because of poor planning and mistakes on my part
Would you mind posting the mask maps here? I'd like to take a look for my project.
And here's the textures at double game res (created at 4x game res)
Maybe a little green on mask2 would help the face pop a little too. Overall good work, and keep it coming
What do you mean by breaking up the edges, Nannou? UV seam along hard edges? Or having softer edges on the highpoly ?
The importer is still buggy but I was finally able to get some previewer shots on a Void weapon Robobobo and I have been working on:
I've also been working on some ward concepts by the lovely beetrootChan:
spawn
idle
idle rare
death
spawn
idle
idle rare
death
Hit me with them crits!
No crits here, just love!
It seems like it's some color bleed from the eyes on the texture but when I resize the image to game res, there's loads of space between the UV shells. The black bleeding into the eye, I can understand but the yellow bleeding into the black just baffles me. All of the masks are the same size in terms of the color islands. Any idea whats going on here?
By the way, are ward textures 256x256 or 512x512 at game res? The requirements page says 512, the ingame importer says 256...
Here's the textures at 512x512 and 256x256 respectively
EDIT:
Here's a Maya screengrab with the 256 textures. some of the seams are visible but none of the color bleeding happens... dafuq?!