Hand Painting Grass & Dirt Textures - Feedback

Jarvgrimr

Hey all!

I am currently working on a project with a few colleagues and have been tasked with creating the ground stamps (UDK based game) for the tileset we are creating.

Now the style is very, very simplified. Mostly flat colours and the like, and any detail that is shown needs to be fairly hand-painted-esque.

Now I went through a few iterations of this, each one too realistic, but this is my current attempt at a very simplified (as in, not showing every blade of grass, just doing a... Torchlight 2/Diablo 3 styled and soft ground maps).

Currently it isn't seamless and it needs to be, but I am concerned that the way I have hand painted it won't work well as a tiling texture. Any advice, tips or feedback would be most welcome!

Cheers
Jarvgrimr

PS: I will update this with the dirt & other grass texture as I go along!

ZacD

I'd look at the grass in Dota2 as an example, even if it's suppose to be simple, there needs to be enough contrast and details to make it interesting and read like grass.

Torch

Are you using any reference? What ZacD said, also check out WoW for grass reference it'll help a lot. Right now the changes in areas are too subtle, more like paint splats than grass.

Jarvgrimr

My main reference was the grass textures for the opening levels of Torchlight 2, which are a little more simplified than the DotA2 textures. Then the style that has been designed for this project is even more simplified, it's almost flat. I haven't been able to find any good reference that matches it style wise... it's almost TF2 characters with heaps of detail removed...

I am going to try and push the contrast a bit and re-post.

JoshWilkinson

I spent fifteen seconds on levels and dropped your saturation down, this was my result: far more contrast and visual interest.

Also, rotating the blades of grass is a good idea to get omnidirectional patterns, but you've made your blades too directional and they seem to just follow circular patterns that move outward from the center. This reult reads like water ripples and destroys all hope of tiling.

Jarvgrimr

Yeah I thought I was being very smart, going for the curved grassy bits, but it has turned into a bit of a ripple effect. I am not entirely sure how our textures are being used, they mentioned they were used like a stamp as opposed to a tiled texture... I think if I break up some of those bigger curves... and move the grass blades around a little to get rid of that ripple effect.

I had a go-over it with some more highlights and shadow changes, to fix the contrast, but I think I'll do exactly what you did over the top as well

Thanks for taking the time to have a tinker with my stuff and point this info out to me :poly003:

Update... tomorrow.

Jarvgrimr

Another version, I think it needs something else, I tried to make it less busy without losing the idea that it's grass... also I can see a few odd pinches in the grass. This is the original tile repeated 4 times.

ZacD

it looks more like a green shag rug than grass.

whiketan

You need much higher contrast on that, for it to be convincing.
Notice how the grass here has nice, sharp edges. Also notice the the white highlights on some of blades because of the shiny nature of grass. Try to get a more random pattern instead of the whole thing flowing upward, and use some nice deep purple black shadows to get some contrast. If you want to know how to get crisp edges just use a brush with 100% hardness.

whiketan

wouldn't hurt to throw in some dead looking grass either.

Jarvgrimr

Well I ended up being totally in-undated by other work stuffs, but have returned to this project recently. I started from scratch with the grass, and while I'm not totally pleased with it, I think it's a better starting point.

The colours are off, and they look so broad, as to almost be leaves. So I want to go back and re-do the base file I used to make the blades. What do you guys think?


I also tried out making a dirt texture, it lacks contrast I think, but I am in a rush to finish it, and see it in-engine with the lighting system. Then I can see how I need to alter it. Any crits, comments and curses are all welcome!