First Environment Texture

Haftoof

Just wanted to get some feed back, I'm working in GIMP so I've been reading over text for photoshop and searching out the correct methods in GIMP.

Anyways:



I've cleaned up the texture jpg a little bit since the screenshot but that's about it. Used a mixture of decals and texture work from CGTextures.com. Any feed-back would be appreciated.

SpeedyB

Its hard to accurately evaluate your textures with such flat lighting. Do your textures have normal and specular maps? If so then its best to import your scene into a game engine like UDK so that we can see how it looks in-game.

The only crits I can give you now is that your concrete base texture is a bit too tiled. A higher resolution one would make it look much less repetitive.

Haftoof

I have not looked into normal or specular maps yet. I'll look into a game engine in the future though. I agree, for a first shot (and without a paying account on CG textures I agree).

Are there any good ways to break up a tiled texture without having larger resolution ones? Blurring techniques perhaps? I tried to manually break up the tiling of the overlay rust and dirt with different runs and positioning.

Meteorkid

Just based on what i see here (i know you have cleared you textures up a bit but) make sure you textures don't have to much detail and character to them otherwise they run the risk of repeating visually. In udk you can use vertex painting and decals to break up tiling areas. That and zonal/generic lighting.

SpeedyB

What resolution did you download your base concrete texture at?
I don't have a payed account on CG Textures and I find there maximum size is usually enough.

You could probably improve your existing textures a lot by removing the dark seams in the concrete texture, it makes the tileing more obvious.

mrturtlepaste

A good method for adding variety to a surface using a tiled texture is to add some decals on top. For example if you took your base wall texture and removed some of the tiling grunge on it. Get that tiling perfectly so there are no seams. Then from there you can add another layer of geometry that is adding unique details like some grunge in parts.

This method allows you to add a ton of variety and non-uniformity to your surfaces because you have control of their blending on a vert by vert basis.

Also your presentation here. Are we seeing a large texture sheet you made that you are mapping all your geo to? If so, I strongly advise you to make these textures by themselves instead of all on one big sheet like this. That way you can really tile them properly with your UVs. Stick to power of twos for your textures, 256x256, 512x512, 1024x1024, 512x1024...etc etc.

So instead of a texture that maps to the entire floor, make a nicely detailed wood texture, tile it on your floor geometry and then from there get a nice grunge texture and place it where you want it.

hope this helps.

Haftoof

I'll look into some work on the tiled texture, maybe a combination of some Photoshop work and looking into seeing if I can get a higher res texture to replace on the plaster layer. This was as much an attempt at learning Photoshop type software as getting the first textures into Maya and assigned as a material.

This is a texture sheet purely for the walls/floor/ceiling of the room. I exported the UVSnapshot into GIMP and worked then assigned the material into Maya.

When you say tile vs using a texture that maps to the entire floor, how would you achieve tiling in Maya? is that possible as a material assigned to an area? Also how would you achieve uniqueness beyond the texture if you used tiling? I ended up tiling the floor wood then using a set of layers (rust and grunge) over top of the base tiling.

I'll play with the walls in photoshop and post an update to see if my work can clean out the seams a little, if it works I'll call it a success in learning the basics.

Appreciate the feedback!

Haftoof

Here's the updated Texture with the UV Layer showing... I used a combo of blur and smudge to try to get rid of some of the black "Cracks" that run across the Texture.

I'm gonna try this lighting use of Ambient Occlusion included into the texture that my reading suggests and see how it turns out, I'll post a follow up afterwards.

mrturtlepaste

Hey Haftoof,
I whipped up a quick example of what I meant before using your current texture. Hopefully this helps.

Haftoof

Okay now here's the question because as I understand it when I built my UV's, I purposefully laid them out to maximize the resolution of the texture within the space I had (the most optimal I could see). At one point I had all the walls attached, but it wouldn't allow me to fit it without scaling it down. So I need to change the UV Layout specifically for each piece (seen in your first picture) or is it how I'm applying the materials to the wall in Maya?

This is just my stab at understanding, I would take the UV layout for the walls and solely scale them to fill the space I used within the first picture for everything?

Then do the same for the floor, and the same for the ceiling. Is there an efficient way to scale the walls together to fill that space or would I still need to break the walls down (Two walls per section, one on top, one on bottom)? I would then build a texture for the new layout of the walls, ceiling and floor individually and load each texture (Floor, ceiling, walls) in maya separately? The result being higher resolution, does it have any effects on the models resources? (Loading time, rendering time?)

Appreciate the help, super helpful learning.

DougClayton4231

I would suggest using the entire 0-1 UV space for the repeating concrete wall section and moving the other textures to a different texture atlas. Repeating the texture in the material will give the same effect and eliminate the need to waste texture space on a repeat of the same texture in multiple places.

Haftoof

Just a quick final update here, I did some work on the texturing for the windows to learn transparency mapping and also applied some normals to the scene.



Should pretty much close out this line of learning, any feed back would be appreciated.

DougClayton4231

I would say that you should lower the intensity of your normal map on your textures. You can do that to the normal map by overlaying a flat normal map color (128, 128, 255) on top of your current image in Photoshop or adjusting your settings in the Hypershade editor in Maya.

If you don't have Photoshop, you can download a free copy of CS2 from Adobe here (Adobe kindly released it as freeware): http://www.techspot.com/downloads/3689-adobe-photoshop-cs2.html

I would recommend getting used to an older version of Photoshop over using a freeware program, like GIMP or Paint.Net, because it will help you to build the skills necessary to become a better texture artist. Hope that helps

djoexe

I strongly suggest you to take the needed time to learn the process of asset creation. Do not rush yourself to do everything at once. Know how to model slowly with tutorial...there are plenty of those on youtube already. Then, learn the basic of texturing and texture tiling. Take all the time you need before doing a complete scene with everything so so.

Haftoof

For right now my goal is to understand the workflow and the basics of the tools. My next "projects" are truly going to be deep dives into the areas I'm learning.

Haftoof

Also Doug, why would using photoshop over gimp or paint be any different? I know some of the features aren't there but what difference does it make if the architecture is no different?

Ill look into lowering the intensity just to see how it affects things.

Thanks for the feedback.

cholden

Gotta update the UVs per mrturtlepaste's post.

Turn off shape recognition in CrazyBump.

Luka

Haftoof wrote: »

Also Doug, why would using photoshop over gimp or paint be any different? I know some of the features aren't there but what difference does it make if the architecture is no different?

if/when you get into the industry, it will be way easier to work as you will be used of teh way PS handels things and so on.

Haftoof

Luka wrote: »

if/when you get into the industry, it will be way easier to work as you will be used of teh way PS handels things and so on.

Is it really that different? As much as I would love to just work with Photoshop (Newer versions anyways) it seems like besides a few of the choices and workflows for a particular effect GIMP has enough scripting and plugins to achieve the same thing. Even some of the stuff from the tutorial I'm working through took maybe 4-5 minutes to find a transfer over into GIMP.

I'll download the free PS2 and give it a try, just another tool in my eyes. :thumbup:

DougClayton4231

Haftoof wrote: »

Is it really that different? As much as I would love to just work with Photoshop (Newer versions anyways) it seems like besides a few of the choices and workflows for a particular effect GIMP has enough scripting and plugins to achieve the same thing. Even some of the stuff from the tutorial I'm working through took maybe 4-5 minutes to find a transfer over into GIMP.

I'll download the free PS2 and give it a try, just another tool in my eyes. :thumbup:

It's definitely what Luka said, building great Photoshop skills early on will make things easier for you down the road, mainly because it is the defacto image editor for pretty much every game studio. It seems a little intimidating at first, but it will easily grow to be your favorite image editor too after a few weeks/months

Haftoof

DougClayton4231 wrote: »

It's definitely what Luka said, building great Photoshop skills early on will make things easier for you down the road, mainly because it is the defacto image editor for pretty much every game studio. It seems a little intimidating at first, but it will easily grow to be your favorite image editor too after a few weeks/months

I just don't want to get attached, the price tag on software is steadily growing T..T

DougClayton4231

It's not too bad now, you can get Photoshop CC for ~$20 a month if you can't shell out for the full price. Think of it as in investment rather than a product.