Help with worn metal texture

paupau

Hi.

I go to a school where I read 3D and animation, but to be honest, I don't feel like they teach us what's necessary to know. Like texturing for example. I was never taught how to unwrap properly until I got angry and basically forced my teacher to show me. So, even though I study 3D, I don't know much about it. And the things we get taught isn't made for games either, so my techniques aren't the best. I've been using Boolean for example, which I guess is a terrible way of making holes and what not, but I was never taught how to do it manually.

Anyway, I'm now doing a firepost which I'm pretty much done with (there are probably loads of stuff I could change and improve, but I don't know how), except the texturing part. And I was thinking that maybe someone could help me out? I have a red base (it's horrible, but I don't know how to make it any better), but I want it to look old/worn/rusty. How would I go about the whole thing? I guess there are several ways to do it, and I don't need it to look perfect, just better than it does now. It looks too neat and new.

Thanks in advance!

(The quality of the photo is really bad, I just rendered it out real quickly. But I can't say I've been properly taught how to render things nicely either.)

miguelfanclub

Hi there.

Well, if your model is correctly unwrapped then its time you just jump into photoshop and make the texture there.
You need to make an image file from your uv's and load it into photoshop and start looking for textures.

I reccomend you to go to www.cgtextures.com and look for those metals you are looking for and have lot of references of real ones.

Zarakun

Hi, welcome for your first post here!
I learn 3D by myself, I could have started a 3D private school but it is quite expensive and I'm not sure it would have helped me that much compared to the price.
There are so many great course free or cheap on internet from really talented and experimented instructors.

As I'm also working on a fire hydrant atm I thought I could help you in any way. I'm by no mean a pro but like miguelfanclub said, photosourcing is often the fastest way to ad details. Most of the tutorials I saw generally use a selection by color to isolate the wanted details of a photography. Then, once passed in a new layer and resized/rotated properly you can use the blend if function of your layer and blend smoothly your details by pressing alt/option while dragging the sliders. Finally you can also apply a mask to your layer and refine your layer by painting black and white on the mask with a custom or appropriate brush. Then don't forget to propagate your changes also on your specular map/gloss map, and your normal map (you can use nDo for this step if you're familiar with this).

You can also experiment your own way, I don't think there is an absolute rule for texturing and only the result should matter (and probably the time spent on an asset in production i think )

I sculpted my rust on a separate object under zbrush and placed this rusted object underneath my clean painted object, then I applied a small negative inflate to the rust hydrant and using a layer brush to remove small parts of the clean object , the rust appeared. Then I baked all my maps from these combined HP obj.

So I don't really think there is only one way to achieve something.

To finish, here are some of the great resources I used and still use in combination with polycount forum to learn everything I need on my own.

Some of these links are mentioned in the polycount wiki which is a good start for everything:

http://wiki.polycount.com
https://www.3dmotive.com
http://cg.tutsplus.com
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/materials.html

I also used when I started an amazing learning material from Andrew Klein very complete and structured but it doesn't seem to be available anymore (try it's youtube channel maybe) http://www.youtube.com/user/slorpthegillman/videos

Well I hope it helped you in any way despite my small experience.
Good luck for your school and your projects.

paupau

@miguelfanclub, this might be a stupid thing to ask, but how do you make an image file from the uv's? And thanks for the reply.

paupau

@Zarakun, wow thank you so much for the detailed reply! It's much appreciated. I'll save your notes and and try it out tomorrow when I'm back at school. Hopefully it'll go better now. Once again, thank you!

Visceral

I recomend dividing your materials in Photoshop groups.

Lets say you have one group with just the paint. Spend all your time in that group and make the paint look like you want.
Under that create a rusty metal'ish texture.
Then you can easily just pain on the layer mask for the group with various brushes to produce the result you want.

paupau

I've never actually made a texture before, hence all the questions. I've only used jpg's. Nothing in photoshop. But I think I get what you mean, @Visceral, but doesn't it have to have a certain shape? Like, as if you folded it out. How would I do that with the firepost? And I don't know that much about baking and normals and all of that either. I'm really new to texturing.

Zarakun

You should try to watch quickly some of the tutorial resources I provided to have an idea of how to bake common maps like normal or AO map at least.

For your question about the shape of the texture parts, this is where a good UV unwrapping is important. When you unwrap manually your UVs, apply a checkboard on your material. Then when you unfold and smooth your UVs inside the UV editor you can watch the checkboard distortion disappear, you can use free and easy softwares like roadkill to help you track distorted areas. Since you have a complete control on your UV layout, if you think and unfold everything correctly to stay as flat and aligned as possible you don't really have to compensate inside photoshop. However if you need to, you still can use free transform option inside photoshop or the puppet wrap function for complex deformations. Finally when you texture, you should check as often as possible the result of your actions inside photoshop to correct anything if something's wrong. For instance leave a software like marmoset opened as the texture automatically refresh when it is your active window.

Texturing for game is a really wide topic and I only know few bases of it. Most of talented artists have years and years of experience and still learn everyday so it's juste a matter of knowing where to search good information on how to do stuffs and experimenting.

paupau

@Zarakun, fair enough. I've found some tutorials that seems pretty good, and I'll give them a watch and we'll just see how it goes from there. Thank you so much for the help!

Count Vader

I definitely second Zarakun's suggestion of
https://www.3dmotive.com

Absolutely fantastic learning materials, well worth the money.

paupau

@Count Vader, cheers! I'll look more into it when I have more money. It looks really good!