30 days of hand-painted textures

hykare

Hi everyone, I've decided to try and learn painting textures.

Here are some of my previous attempts(6 months ago):


I could never quite get the depth right, it took ages to finish anything and I mostly gave up. Now I have a month o more or less free time, we'll see how it goes!

Day 1



Day 2



Any critiques and suggestions welcome.

TonyNowak

Chips and cracks around the interior beveled parts and maybe some pebbles between the cracks some grass?

hykare

Thanks, now that I look at the cracks they do look too empty. I've never painted grass before so I'll have to figure out how to do that and post the results with the texture later.

Jeff Parrott

Good thread idea!

Some advice though. Work large to medium to small.

Looking at the strokes in your textures you can see that you're not doing that.

Try to not paint zoomed in at 300%. Stay around 100% or so. Make sure you're looking at a smaller duplicate window (or easy just the navigator window in Photoshop).

Finally I would work in greyscale getting a handle on the values first. Once you're super good at that then work in color. Getting value, hue, and saturation correct is like learning to juggle 3 balls at once. It's tough. Start with value and slowly work in additional hues.

unit187

Jeff Parrott wrote: »

Finally I would work in greyscale getting a handle on the values first. Once you're super good at that then work in color. Getting value, hue, and saturation correct is like learning to juggle 3 balls at once. It's tough. Start with value and slowly work in additional hues.

Good one. But don't overdo greyscale, because when you introduce color you will got to repaint quite a bit, so it does not worth the effort to make flawless greyscale.

JacqueChoi

Great initiative.

Vary the volumes a lot more.
Vary the colour brick to brick a lot more.
Vary the contrast lot more.


It's pretty easy to vary grey-scale if you paint your mid-tones and highlights in separate layers.

YakZSmelk

In addition to what the guys said above, I'd like to suggest working with less bricks. If you look at tileable hand painted textures you'll notice they will tile quite a bit but the texture itself is loaded with character.

Check out Faf's thread to get a better idea of what I'm talking about.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=125737

Lowpawly

Hey man! Like other people are saying try varying your shapes up a bit and paint with less rocks so its easier. Also I did a paint over to give you an idea on how to pop out and push shapes in. I hope this helps.

edit: Yeah check out Fannys work she's awesome

hykare

Thanks so much for the tips guys! Ha, I had no idea, but I do work zoomed in. I still keep catching myself but it's so much better and faster this way. And that paintover is really helpful, thank you for taking the time to do that, Lowpawly. Seems so simple, yet somehow i could never get this right.

I added some cracks and pebbles to the previous texture, also reduced horizontal cracks a bit so the stones seem like they are resting on top of each other instead of floating in mortar.


Then I tried to do the grass with a random brush and brush dynamics

Not quite what I had in mind. I'll have to do some foliage studies and find a way to actually paint not-horrible-looking grass instead of pasting blades around. I'll leave it for now.

Here are the shapes for today's texture:



What do you think? I'll do this one in grayscale and try to push some stones in and out.

I have seen Fanny's post and spent an appropriate amount of time drooling over it. It's great inspiration.

hykare

Here's what I've got


That was harder than I expected. I'll have to do a lot more of these, but I gotta go to sleep now, unfortunately.

hykare

Day 4

CarlK3D

Great Job! Great Idea. I tried to do Hand Painted Textures over new years and only ended up with 2 good ones out of about 10.
The Grass one looks great.

My recommendation would be to follow what LowPawly said. use less rocks and more varied shapes. putting more time into 4-5 different shaped rocks and duplicating them around will give a better result in the end then doing 6-10

I look forward to seeing more each day

hykare

Could you elaborate on what you mean by 'varied shapes'? I try to make the rocks different in proportions and size but I feel like I'm missing something here. And by duplicating do you mean copying a finished stone? Or just the shapes? Concentrating on less rocks would be nice, but I can't really rotate them after the light is painted in.

Aerashi

Looking good hykare! When I do handpainted stuff like this I like to work with multiple layers. This may or may not be standard and potentially makes things take a bit longer. I just enjoy a non-destructive workflow which let's me go back and make changes.

I'd suggest a layer with your flat colour, a layer with a guide for where you want your details and then a shadow layer and highlight layer. One of the nice things about doing it this way is you can be pretty messy on each layer and then use the eraser to carve out the perfect shapes, along with using individual layers as selections to delete/mask the other layers.

Regarding tiling, remember that as the texture will tile a lot you want to be careful about making and part too light/dark compared to the rest. Fanny's stuff is awesome and if you check her VERTEX 2 (http://www.artbypapercut.com/ if you've not picked up this awesome free piece of knowledge) workflow you'll see what I mean. Her point on staggering details in a sensible ways (as shown by the rune carved blocks) is spot on too. Her stuff is around page 276 if I remember rightly.

Pardon the wall of text!

Bartalon

Hey, looking good. You seem to be focusing a lot of your detail around the edges of the stones which is leaving the surfaces rather smooth and unblemished. Adding some highlights and shadows across the rock faces will add some subtle unevenness that should help sell the rockiness better.

hykare

I actually had too many layers - one for each side - and the initial sketch was on the shadow layer. It got messy. This one has just light, shadow, base and mortar. Way better. I copied the rocks as per Fanny's tutorial. Also painted some shadows on the rock surfaces but I don't know about their 'rockiness'...

Aerashi: Are you kidding, it's amazing how I get such thought out replies from you guys. I'm all for walls of text.

So, Day 5:



I gotta start coloring these, so they'll look prettier and boost my morale. They all look the same -_- Do you think it's a good idea to try wood or different materials, or should I just hammer these until I get it?

Snafubar7

hykare wrote: »

I gotta start coloring these, so they'll look prettier and boost my morale. They all look the same -_- Do you think it's a good idea to try wood or different materials, or should I just hammer these until I get it?

Jump around from different materials when you practice. If you want to go nuts, I'll tell you what we did in my digital painting course where everyone improved drastically. One week we'd paint 6 different kinds of stone textures (granite, stone slabs, obsidian, etc --or even a couple the same kind), then the next week do 6 different kinds of wood textures (dead wood, polished wood, tree bark, warm tavern-like wood, etc). That's all we did all semester, each week 6 textures of different types of a material.

Use reference while you paint and focus on what that material does. For example, getting the crack patterns and shapes on rocks correctly (like you have nicely done) hits harder than getting the small gritty details down.

hykare

That's a great idea Snafubar, I'm going to do that from now on. I'm doing 7 a week anyway, right?

Here's day 6 (that's yesterday, I had trouble with the internet connection)

SanderDL

I think you are making good progress on painting the shapes but you need to work on your tiling. You have some repeating elements in the texture itself which you should try to avoid. Otherwise it is really obvious that your texture is tiled.

Luxap

Very nice to see your progress! Love the textures but as previously mentioned some are quite repetetive. But I love em all!

Good progress, keep going!

hykare

I have problems with the tiling, if I make a shape too distinctive the repeating shows but I don't want to be boring either. I think repeating shapes within the texture is fine as it's been suggested here and in Fanny Vergne's tutorial in Vertex 2.

I used a granite cliff face as a reference

Xelan101

Repeating shapes are certainly fine, and similar shapes within a texture will help bring some cohesion to the texture. But, that said if you're going to repeat those shapes identically, with no difference in painting, then there's no reason to make the texture that large (cause that's what the tiling will do). Looking at your most recent piece I can pick out where the duplication happens pretty easily and can see that there's identical painting on those parts.

(Note, disregard what I've said above if what you're showing each time is in fact the texture tiled four times)

Your texture will tile over huge areas in an environment, so you want to make every pixel count, it's a balancing act to make sure nothing stands out too much, but at the same time taking advantage of the number of unique pixels you have control of. Even if you're using the same shapes, break up the surface texture or change up how the light hits it a bit, that way they're not obviously copies of one another, you'll get enough of that when it's tiled.

On a painting note, I feel like your newest texture could benefit from some bevels that point in the opposite direction, your reference has plenty of sharp strong hairline breaks on the left side, but it does still have some that are chipped and weathered on the left revealing more of the form of the rock.

You can also increase contrast just a bit to help push form and dimensionality and add some stronger chunky surface details to it to push the roughness of these rocks.

For surface detail take a look at some successful environment textures, stuff from WoW obviously, there's a Russian game called Allods Online which has some stunning high detail painted textures and even just look around the forum at handpainted projects

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=130886 this guy has some plaster/stucco in his project, look at how even though that's meant to be a pretty flat single color surface he's injected so much surface detail, slight value shifts bounded by small highlights and shadows to suggest little valleys and peaks and indents in the surface. Your rocks by contrast feel very smooth and clean, almost polished by the sea or something, which looking at your reference is not the intent.

I'm liking what you had on Day 6 painting wise, I'd look at what you did there along with plenty of reference moving forward, I'd suggest making a ref board not only of the picture from real life you want to imitate, but also of textures that tackle a similar subject to see what sorts of artistic choices are being made by others.

Sorry for the wall of text, I hope it helps

metric meditation

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hykare

Hey guys, sorry I haven't updated but I broke my laptop and it's going to take some time before i get a replacement

Xelan: the texture is in fact tiled 4 times, but it's still too repeatable. I think I should avoid using too distinctive shapes, like triangular rocks or the tall and narrow ones. I'm having trouble with the surface detail, namely rough stone. In the photos light scatters a lot, I don't know how to imitate that.

Thank you for the critiques and the tutorial, I can't wait to get my hands on a computer