Student texture artist learning thread

Solmas

Hello! My name's Seth and I'm due to graduate at the end of the year. I'm working with a couple other students to put together a level in UDK which I plan on using as a portfolio piece.

My school program has trained me in a generalized skill set and I've decided that I want to specialize in lighting and textures -- I'm hoping to use the rest of this year to streamline my workflow and improve my art skills to get as close to a professional level as possible. I am most grateful for any and all feedback on my work and advice on workflow techniques -- GDC 2013 made me very, very humble

This is a floor texture I made using a couple different Substances with a custom photoshop grout brush I made from cgtextures images. My thinking here is to create a texture that can be applied to a plane and model/extrude some or all of the bricks and build modular pieces from it. I added a rounded section to handle soft corners and arched pathways and I bordered the edge of the texture to use for end/border pieces. This is currently 1024 and will be part of a 2048 floor texture atlas.

Thanks in advance for all the help and I'm excited to learn as much as I can!

Solmas

BTW I'm graduating from a Game Art Design program with a B.S. -- realized I didn't mention that till after I hit the go button

walkonsky

i guess, the usual way to create textures is just the other way around: dont start with the diffuse. if you want to use the scene as a portfolio piece, you probably want to do the high poly-low poly-bake workflow to get nice details in a normal map. with some other bakes you can then start your other texture maps.

if you stick to that diffuse you posted, i think you have too much lighting information in the diffuse. light seems to be coming from the top left. if you use the texture in a different relation to the light sources in your scene, it will look wrong.
you might also want to improve the moss which does not read well.

Solmas

Hi walkonsky, thank you very much for the feedback! You're right about the lighting on the diffuse, I've never thought of that before! I'll remember that from now on when I'm building a diffuse texture

I'm not sure I understand the high poly-low poly-bake workflow exactly, I'm scouring the forum now for threads and tutorials.

Off the top of my head I imagine it to be modeling the asset in low poly, bringing it to mudbox/zbrush to sculpt and paint, then extracting the maps to the low poly mesh? I've gone through that particular workflow only a few times -- normally I build a color palette, paint/build textures, then model the assets based on those textures.

You say this is the usual way to create textures though and if that's industry standard then that's the way I wanna go with it. Do you know any good resources to outline that workflow?

dpadam450

If you have a year to work with and that is your go at a diffuse then I'd be worried and sleepless trying to get good. I'm not one to sugar coat anything so I play Simon Cowell a lot but basically I'd be worried that 3 years of work and this is your post. I hope you can at least model well or you need to seriously evaluate if you want a job or not. This is troubling, 3 years?

On to some productive criticism. Imagine a mountain that has a diffuse with lighting in it as suggested with a shadow casting from left to right. Now the sun moves to the right of the mountain. The right side of the mountain is still in shadow because the diffuse has darkness on the right side. Same applies to any textures be it bricks/concrete etc.

"Substances with a custom photoshop grout brush I made from cgtextures images"
This looks unusable. You'd have been better off using a straight brick texture from cg-textures. I'm curious to see the actual original image. Your image is so noisy and looks like you saved it compressed to a lossy jpeg (It is so blurry what the heck cgtextures does not have blur like that).

"This is currently 1024 and will be part of a 2048 floor texture atlas"
You are probably better off just tiling this over the floor and slapping on decals. I'm not sure how many people use texture atlas, but GPU's have texture arrays nowadays where you can store stacks of the same size texture and a shader references which texture to use at any given pixel (for say terrain).