Sculpting and texturing thoughts, need advice

Kyuzo

Hi all,
i spent quite of time practicing of stone sculpting/texturing, and hope did not that bad:





But for now i can't say i'm really happy with my workflow:
- Sculpt something stone-looking
- build up base colormap of cavity/peaks (sometimes)
- Bake maps/matcaps
- mix photo textures with bake to get something looking like that pictures on top.
- use ndo2 to create surface details on normal map(moss on last picture was just taken from photo and put on)

This is what last one came from:


I start thinking that using photo textures is quite perverse practice, since when i come to create something directly, like just reproduce something like this:

i dont know how i can do it by myself, every small details, without photo generated alphas. And more of that, with regards to texturing, i can't understand how i could use my really detailed sculpt. I should polypaint it in zbrush, or it should be done in photoshop?

Should i just keep practicing on surface definition sculpting(not forms, but all small details), or it's just a time waste and no one really doing it?

It's not about just stone, but any other surface(For example last time i made hay and fur just from photo textures then converted to normals overlayed on clean surfece normal map.. lolz).

Will be happy to hear your opinions.

PS: works form Guillaume Provost make me jealous and grow thoughts that i'm doing something wrong

Fwap

Hey, firstly i dunno if you are looking for crits on your first textures or not, but they don't look to bad, IMO they are a little bit grainy/noisy. Be careful when blending detail normals from photosource with sculpted normals that you dont destroy the quality of the sculpted normals.

Secondly about how to make the next texture, it doesn't really matter how you do something its the end result, so if you are comfortable using alphas and such do that. I start with a photo source for more complex sculpts like a mountain cliff, and generate a height map from the photo and use that as my starting point.

You seemed to have stone down pat, i would recommend moving onto different types of materials, like wood, metal, fabric ect.

Kyuzo

Hey, ty for answer, stone isn't the only i'm working on, it's just what i practiced a lot last month or two.
Other surface types definitly need some love too, and they will for sure, in terms of my current project.

Actually i'm looking for the way to improve my skills, in texturing mostly. I don't like the way i'm doing it(put some photos, make it tileable, blend with base, voila). Probably i know already how i can do it, but really interested in opinions of experienced artists.

AtticusMars

Your first 3 textures are really good examples of texturing the wrong way, like you just put a bunch of photos through crazybump. The normals are very pillowy and you have edge detection artifacts everywhere.

Last one is great, it's a bit noisy but nothing particularly wrong with it. Romy's work is very good but its also stylized, if that's what you're going for then I'd suggest killing a lot of the noise, focusing on the large/medium shapes and pushing your edge highlights, make the highlights thin/tight not fat and blurry like your second image, and push the ambient shadows up.

If you don't want to use photos you can get similar/better results with well-made photoshop brushes but you're probably going to find it really hard to make convincing looking noise without using a photosource for the brush.. and I'm almost 100% certain looking at Romy's textures that he used photos in a lot of his diffuse maps, just doesn't look like hes generating normals from them.

Kyuzo

2AtticusMars: ty for response, but fun fact here is that only last one i made overlaying normal maps generated from diffuse. First three normal maps was from sculpt only.

Have to create more detailed sculpts and try one more time, also i should probably try out polypainting.

Photos is an easy way as i see it, and i'm not sure it's a right way, atleast not in all cases. So, there are always a place for improvement. Have to try different approaches.

AtticusMars

If those were generated from sculpts then you need to make your bevels wider to show that there is actually a normal map because the last one is the only one that looks like it has any depth.

via polycount wiki:


Also don't paint your cavities black.

Kyuzo wrote: »

Photos is an easy way as i see it, and i'm not sure it's a right way, atleast not in all cases. So, there are always a place for improvement. Have to try different approaches.

Not sure what you mean by "right way"?

You could model all your detail, generate your AO and masks from the mesh and then just paint color information using the masks. The only problem with that is that it's extremely time consuming and most people won't be able to get a natural looking result without photos, either as textures or as alphas.

If you want something stylized that will work fine. If you want something realistic you're going to be limited by how good you are at sculpting.