My textures are bad!

GhostDetector

I've decided to look at Valve's texture to see how they made their items, and there is a vast difference.



Why doesn't mine look like theirs.
So how I was wondering. How did they make their textures? I know they are hand painted. But what process did they go through to make their items look like the way they are?

The way I've done it was to bake an AO map and a cavity map and put colors in it. I used a hard/soft edge brush to color it in(I'm probably missing some steps).

In-game it doesn't make that much difference, but I'd like to know how they did it.

Zaphk

Read Dota 2 texture guide http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/workshop/Dota2CharacterTextureGuide.pdf

GhostDetector

Thank you Zaphk, but I'm trying to figure out how to do from page 6 and 7.

Like, I don't know how they did the rough color map.

Vextrakt

I don't think there's too many tricks for the rough color. Looks like they used a normal hard brush and blended stuff with smudge tool and used gradients on stuff like the large tooth. Just a lot of color variation and higher values towards more visible assets game-view wise.

GhostDetector

Vextrakt wrote: »

I don't think there's too many tricks for the rough color. Looks like they used a normal hard brush and blended stuff with smudge tool and used gradients on stuff like the large tooth. Just a lot of color variation and higher values towards more visible assets game-view wise.

So basically the color texture heavily relies on sculpting and baked maps?

Zidji

I don't think they use the smudge tool to paint, i'm no expert in textures but i wouldn't recommend it. Just a nice brush with pressure sensitivity and the right opacity should do the job.

I was surprised at how simple the textures are though, very high quality and very simple.

Soldeus

Look at some paint blending tutorials for photoshop, it's quite easy in the theory but takes a good while to learn(practice practice pratice!).

Basically, paint a color, and with color picker and Opacity Pressure enabled in the tablet, you start painting and picking up the midtones resulting from the opacity changes to blend it with another color.

Take a look at the 3D Motive handpainted tutorial, it's awesome to learn more in-depth.

Zidji

Basically what soldeus said.

Basic hotkeys:
Use your numbers (1,2,3...8,9,0, 1 is 10%, 0 is 100%) to control brush opacity; pressing left alt lets you use the color picker when you have a brush selected. To change brush size use '' to make it bigger.

Having a tablet of some kind is pretty important, even the entry level tablets can do the job.

Hudston

This is way over complicating things, and the advice already given here is much better in the short term, but learning texturing is very similar to learning digital painting.

Try flicking through the tutorials here, and you'll find a lot that will teach you how to use the painting and editing tools in photoshop better. Your texturing will benefit as a result.

One other quick tip: bake out a bent normal map and copy the green channel onto a layer in your texture. Move the layer to the top, set it to overlay and adjust the opacitiy. It's not perfect, but in conjunction with your AO and so on, you can quickly do the bulk of your basic shading.