As a 3d artist, should I be drawing designs first or just use some concept that's already been made? 3D takes forever, especially with no designs to use. I'm a slow learner to this; any insight from anyone on the forum; I will be grateful.
One thing I've found with these forums, you can update and post progress for ages and nobody will respond, then at some point you post a small update and you get three pages of replies. Just keep the thread updated and people will respond eventually.
Also, try uploading your images to a link able source (Google sites is what I use) so that people don't have to click on a thumbnail to see your art.
Use concepts, and when you will be faster, use your concepts. That's what I did.
Concepting while learning 3d is not effective because you never get things done.
If you want to excel in 3d art, communicate with colligues efficiently and and be able to texture well, then learning to draw at a basic level is imperative. Just don't worry about concepting every piece you do while learning 3d. Just make sure you sketch something cool and do some environment or composition studies once a week , maybe.
Once you know how to create 3d environments, you don't want to be limited by using other peoples concepts the way they are, and you'll need to understand the shapes and composition of those pieces anyway to replicate it well.
Basically, theres no need to know how to paint masterpieces before you can learn 3d, but learning how to draw a little can only help.
I found that learning 3D will greatly improve your drawing skills. But for starters, try working off of someone else's concepts, while using a bit of your time just sketching out what you think is cool. Eventually you will find where skills in one area will help the other.
Details are taking forever. Sometimes I wonder if anybody gives a shit about the details I put in and it makes me not want to work or do anything. Anyway, I'm planning on having this one building modulate throughout the level. I am not sure how big to build a level so that it's up to a professional level. On building the level, which package should I use to make rocks that block the player from access to other areas zbrush or mudbox?
I hope somebody knows something about this situation.
For starters you need to do your UVs before moving it into the UDK. There is no way you can texture that in its current state.
As far as creating props for your scene goes, its a matter of preference. Personally I would suggest Zbrush.
And don't feel offended if no one notices you work, that's just how it is. You seem really impatient, like you instantly want to make something extraordinarily awesome (don't we all?). What you have to understand is learning can be (and usually is) mind numbingly boring and requires a lot of experimentation and you're not always going to get feedback or advice, sometimes you have to figure stuff out by yourself--if you don't like that, 3d art might not be the thing for you... that or you should consider learning at a school instead of teaching yourself. Also being polite usually encourages more feedback
Everyone is trying to help you yet you're being really stubborn and kind of ignoring their advice.
On a side note:
I'm just going to write out my story. As a preface, I've been doing 3d for about 2 years..
When I first started 3D, I had this huge ego (don't we all )of I can design this dope stuff and it'll be super crazy good. Well I spent my first year making really bad pieces because I didn't know how to design stuff. If I had spent my first year working off of concepts I probably would be ahead of where I am right now.
So you should make a new thread, pick a concept to work off from, and get going!!
Wow holy arrogant , hey buddy relax. There is a wiki go through that and learn a lot of concepts. You need to practice every day if you want to get better, not just in modeling but in concepts as well.
You posted 3 times in 1 day and just complained , why would anyone help you over that ? This forum is for artist to help each other and learn sometime's it takes days, sometimes those artist who are fantastic don't check everyday
I know that there are many people on this board that know more than me; so this is where I (shamefully) come to for help. I cannot seem to get rid of all the grimmy normal map garbage going in between each tile. Do I have to paint them all by hand or is there another way? I cannot afford Zbrush or Crazybump right now and have been scouring the internet for answers. I'd be grateful for any help.
You can use the Quixel Suite for now. It has a free trial until next month or so (forgot, sorry).
As for painting normal maps... you don't want to do that, unless you really know what you're doing, and you are doing it for some very specific thing. Fixing normal maps is common, but painting from scratch... not really.
What you can do is just paint height maps or even shapes (which is much easier), and then convert it all to normals using the Quixel Suite.
I solved it. I created a desaturated, tightened up level edited base map and then set the psduvfilter to normal settings, but then I changed the scale to 5 instead of default 15 and it tightened up the garbarge and seems on the final mesh! Onward Ho!
I was wondering if anybody could make a suggestion as to what kind of material this is? It's during the colonial times, except I am unable to determine if it's wood or stone or what?
You are working from a fairly simple concept so there is a lot of room for interpretation. If I had to guess however, based on similar concepts, I would say thats a stone texture.
On the note of normal maps, I would strongly suggest you pick up Bitmap2Material. At only 50 USD for the indie version, this program is designed to make photo to material creation (which I assume is what you want to do) a piece of cake. All you have to do is drop a photo in there and it'll automatically create all your maps (diffuse,normal,spec,gloss, height, yadayada). You can cancel/adjust directional lighting/shadows, balance colors to avoid obvious tiling, automatically tile the texture, adjust normal strength, and so much more. Another program I would suggest is Substance Designer, but it's a little bit more expensive. Good luck!
Tutorials are your friend! Before going too far with your texturing, I would look at some basic concepts and principles of creating game assets. Especially if you're going into environments, there is an extremely wide range of skills that you'll need to succeed.
This page is an extremely helpful resource for any aspiring environment artist:
While sculpting isn't mandatory for simple game stuff (i.e. mobile), it is an incredibly important skill to utilize to bring your environments to the next level.
Some great tutorials on there on how to do wood, rock, bricks, etc. for use in your textures, and as modular assets.
If you are looking at making your city modular, there is a butload of awesome tutorials here:
The wiki itself is a wealth of collective information from professionals in the community. Try to refer to it often when tacking something new, especially if you aren't sure how to go about it.
Building update. I have learned some things along the way thus far, but am continuing forward and trying to implement them along the way. Good luck everybody. Hope everyone is having a good Saturday night.
Here is an update of my progress. Hoping to finish it in the next few days, but that's a stretch. I never realized how much work goes into making a simple building. Whoever built in for Fable 2- you have my respect!
Ran into a brick wall. I can't seem to get the normal map working in the UDK version of the mesh. Also, is it just me, or does the UDK colormap lose resolution in UDK? I don't know what to do at this point, so if anyone is gracious enough to share their knowledge with me; I'd be deeply grateful.
UDK does compress the textures, so you may encounter some losses. You can tick defer compression during importation to test if the loss is related to compression (however you can't avoid compression completely, it has to happen at some point.) To me your textures look more or less the same in both engines--they are both really low resolution and full of artifacts.
Firstly, what exactly is the problem you are encountering with your normal map in UDK? Is it not showing? Is it displaying artifacts? If possible show a photo of the problem (never hurts).
Secondly, you could probably use higher resolution textures. Go to cgtextures.com and download some textures (as massive as possible, you can downsize them if needed) that are relatively uniform color and have only minimal directional lighting information (which can and will mess with the normal creation if not scrubbed out). Clean them up (make generic textures like the wood siding and roof slates tile seamlessly) in your photo editing software of choice (e.g. gimp or photoshop.) Create normals maps (if you want) using a plugin for your photo editing software or another program like b2m or crazybump.
Lastly, you're making good progress. Keep it up, buddy.
(Sorry for any gibberish and nonsensical sentences, I was just about to go to sleep)
On the note of normal maps, I would strongly suggest you pick up Bitmap2Material. At only 50 USD for the indie version, this program is designed to make photo to material creation (which I assume is what you want to do) a piece of cake. All you have to do is drop a photo in there and it'll automatically create all your maps (diffuse,normal,spec,gloss, height, yadayada). You can cancel/adjust directional lighting/shadows, balance colors to avoid obvious tiling, automatically tile the texture, adjust normal strength, and so much more. Another program I would suggest is Substance Designer, but it's a little bit more expensive. Good luck!
interesting, I've been looking for an application to replace CrazyBump for years. I thought B2M REQUIRES the Substance Designer, so, its quite expensive.
interesting, I've been looking for an application to replace CrazyBump for years. I thought B2M REQUIRES the Substance Designer, so, its quite expensive.
For the indie version, B2M is locked to Substance Player (a free application that runs substances). If you use the professional version, B2M is a standalone substance and can be ran in any program that supports substances like Unity and Substance Designer. Its obviously more convenient when it runs in Substance Designer because you don't have to bounce around between programs but it certainly isn't a make or break problem. It's definitely worth trying if you ask me.
Are you saving your textures as TGA? I've noticed the resolution tends to be the same size on import with TGA files but it'll compress other file formats down (IE if I'm being super lazy and just use my photoshop file, although that's in Unreal Engine 4 so I'm not sure if it's different for you)
1. follow the silhouette of your concept, it is has a lot more juanty angles and interesting bending/warping of walls and roofs etc
2. create some cleaner more high res textures as clusterone suggests, then customise these to fit the style better(highlights on edges, scrapes and scratches or whatever)
3. make sure the scale of everything is right, yes its a fantasy world but if bricks look massive in one wall and small in another it becomes less believable.
This thread has helped me so much, I don't have words for. Without this thread, I'd be annoying my contacts for information; so whoever can help me with this issue; I will be in your debt. The issue is that I have not used the right material for the roof according to the concept. Would I get fired over this? I went through a ton of editing on the roof to get rid of nsided polygons and to add depth by raising random tiles. Do I need to throw away all that work to fit it to concept or should I keep it the way it is? My gut tells me I need to start over on the roof. Anyway, everyone is a genius in their own way. I am hoping one of the 3D geniuses, hopefully watching this thread, will have some constructive advice/knowledge about how to deal with this situation.
I'm a wee bit confused on what you mean over getting fired on the roofs. The roof in the concept drawing is open for interpretation as it currently is, it implies some sort of shingling but is not descriptive. I'd say being able to interpret a concept is important, and so is knowing when to change something if it will better suit the overall final design. If it were a job I'm pretty sure the art director wouldn't fire you because you interpreted a roof drawing differently from how he/she did, and would just kindly tell you what needed to be changed to fit within the art direction parameters for the project.
That said, I think all of the textures and UV mapping could use a complete overhaul. The model itself looks pretty good but the texture work and misaligned UVs are really bringing it down from where it could be.
I'd throw them away and start from a nice new base for the textures, using clearer, higher resolution images for your sources. We're in the days of 1024x1024 and higher multiple textures so don't focus too much on using optimized textures at this stage, focus more on getting the quality down first. And a thing to keep in mind is it is easy to simply compress and scale down an image from say 1024 to 512 or 256, but you can't really make a texture made with 256x256 pixels look good blown up as a 1024x1024 texture.
The roof texture is your primary culprit since it's the most obvious. There is a lot of image noise and artifacts in it that shouldn't be there. (Those random white dots and the random green/red/yellow pixels, which is from using too low a quality or resolution texture)
Usually if your gut is telling you something is wrong, it probably is wrong. And that's a good thing to have happen because it means you're able to critique your own work and figure out what you can do to improve, which is a skill within itself. So good job on that and keep it up!
Thank you sir. I'll take everything you said into consideration, especially about the roof being too low quality a texture and doing an overall re-haul of the base textures. I totally agree with you about that. High quality textures are hard to come by.
If you're looking for a place for free texture sources you could always try www.cgtextures.com
Sure, it's probably overused as a source, but it'll get the job done in finding some higher res photos to use as your base. I'd however recommend doing a little bit more work on changing them up in photoshop, such as tiling them yourself rather than downloading the pre-tiled ones, adding in additional details, tweaking color, mixing different source samples together, etc.
By doing all of that you'll help yourself more in the long run by learning how to do tasks such as creating a seamless tiling texture from a photograph if you haven't already, which you'd probably be doing anyways since I'm sure alot of studios mix between their own library of photographs and paying a couple of guys to go out into the wild with their cameras.
Here's a little fun video of some of the behind the scenes stuff when Bethesda made Oblivion which was one of my inspirations in wanting to work on games growing up. I include it because of the few samples they show in how they themselves will physically go out and photograph some of their own primary sources which is always the best if it's possible to do so. http://youtu.be/zvm0CN3tQFI?t=13m11s
Thank you for the inspiration. I'm thinking of redoing the roof with a higher resolution version. It's throwing away about a days worth of work, but .....well....I guess I'm a perfectionist. I hope to be able to make progress on this while school is in session. Your video was very interesting. Looking for your own textures in the environment sounds like a great idea. Also, I'm going to Raid cgtextures.com for high rez and I know how to make tileable textures; so that's fine. Thank you for all your advice/knowledge. Seriously, I am very grateful that you spent time reading through my issue.
My skills fall flat in producing portfolio level textures; so it is my hope that some genius texture artist happen to read this fairly important "help wanted" message. I could experiment first, but getting the right advice from a well trained texture master would speed things up. Essentially, my issue is with the attached documents. It has come to my attention that the roof of the concept building is composed of wood shingles. There might be some high rez shingles on the internet, but my concern is with developing texture artist skill and not merely using a raw photograph. Should I paint over the asphalt roofs that have been collected over the internet? Is that how it is done? As you will understand from reading this document so far is that my head is very confused and full of frustration. Hopefully someone will know how to deal with this situation. There are alot of talented people on this thread; so I have no doubts that this problem will be collaboratively solved.
I am having alot of trouble with this texture as I have never seen one like this before. I am referring to the concept presented in the attachment section. This guy isn't indicating whether it's wood, brick, stone, shingles, or anything else. Anyway, I was wondering if any of you reading this woulld help guide me in the right direction?
you may need to paint over your texture and rework a few times by the end so that it fits well with all the other textures. Its all part of the process. Enjoy yourself and make something that you like and know that nobody gets it right first time.
Thank you for bringing me out of my cryostatis in decision making. I'm going to go ahead and use the textures you supplied as best I can. I was just freaking out because I didn't know what the hell the material was made out of. I didn't know you could interpret the concept so easily as you have done. Thank you good sir! I very much appreciate it. Now, I can move forward.
I think you are misunderstanding something Cory. Using photos to create textures is a very common process employed by every major studio in some shape or form--it doesn't make you less of an artist. If you are serious about doing realistic materials you definitely want to practice this. Certain artistic styles may call for entirely hand painted textures. If you are making a realistic texture from a photo, typically the only painting you will do is for the sake of cleaning; canceling directional lighting, removing seams, balancing tones and shadows as well as compositing--you don't have to do a draw over unless you want to. If you want to do hand painted textures, there are loads of tutorials on youtube as well as a few here.
Thank you. You have brought much to my attention. There is still at least 2 weeks worth of work to be done on it on and off; at least that's what I presume. I am taking classes at the academy of art university: current class (please don't laugh): Elements of Video Games. Essentially, its a general overview of what happens in the game industry. To validate the class, a 30 year Senior Game Designer Veteran is teaching the class.
Replies
Also, try uploading your images to a link able source (Google sites is what I use) so that people don't have to click on a thumbnail to see your art.
Stay diligent.
Concepting while learning 3d is not effective because you never get things done.
Once you know how to create 3d environments, you don't want to be limited by using other peoples concepts the way they are, and you'll need to understand the shapes and composition of those pieces anyway to replicate it well.
Basically, theres no need to know how to paint masterpieces before you can learn 3d, but learning how to draw a little can only help.
I hope somebody knows something about this situation.
As far as creating props for your scene goes, its a matter of preference. Personally I would suggest Zbrush.
And don't feel offended if no one notices you work, that's just how it is. You seem really impatient, like you instantly want to make something extraordinarily awesome (don't we all?). What you have to understand is learning can be (and usually is) mind numbingly boring and requires a lot of experimentation and you're not always going to get feedback or advice, sometimes you have to figure stuff out by yourself--if you don't like that, 3d art might not be the thing for you... that or you should consider learning at a school instead of teaching yourself. Also being polite usually encourages more feedback
On a side note:
I'm just going to write out my story. As a preface, I've been doing 3d for about 2 years..
When I first started 3D, I had this huge ego (don't we all
So you should make a new thread, pick a concept to work off from, and get going!!
You posted 3 times in 1 day and just complained , why would anyone help you over that ? This forum is for artist to help each other and learn sometime's it takes days, sometimes those artist who are fantastic don't check everyday
I know that there are many people on this board that know more than me; so this is where I (shamefully) come to for help. I cannot seem to get rid of all the grimmy normal map garbage going in between each tile. Do I have to paint them all by hand or is there another way? I cannot afford Zbrush or Crazybump right now and have been scouring the internet for answers. I'd be grateful for any help.
Sincerely,
Cory Kanakis
As for painting normal maps... you don't want to do that, unless you really know what you're doing, and you are doing it for some very specific thing. Fixing normal maps is common, but painting from scratch... not really.
What you can do is just paint height maps or even shapes (which is much easier), and then convert it all to normals using the Quixel Suite.
I was wondering if anybody could make a suggestion as to what kind of material this is? It's during the colonial times, except I am unable to determine if it's wood or stone or what?
Thank you in advance for any help.
Sincerely,
Cory Kanakis
On the note of normal maps, I would strongly suggest you pick up Bitmap2Material. At only 50 USD for the indie version, this program is designed to make photo to material creation (which I assume is what you want to do) a piece of cake. All you have to do is drop a photo in there and it'll automatically create all your maps (diffuse,normal,spec,gloss, height, yadayada). You can cancel/adjust directional lighting/shadows, balance colors to avoid obvious tiling, automatically tile the texture, adjust normal strength, and so much more. Another program I would suggest is Substance Designer, but it's a little bit more expensive. Good luck!
This page is an extremely helpful resource for any aspiring environment artist:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/EnvironmentSculpting
While sculpting isn't mandatory for simple game stuff (i.e. mobile), it is an incredibly important skill to utilize to bring your environments to the next level.
Some great tutorials on there on how to do wood, rock, bricks, etc. for use in your textures, and as modular assets.
If you are looking at making your city modular, there is a butload of awesome tutorials here:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Category:EnvironmentModularity
The wiki itself is a wealth of collective information from professionals in the community. Try to refer to it often when tacking something new, especially if you aren't sure how to go about it.
Ran into a brick wall. I can't seem to get the normal map working in the UDK version of the mesh. Also, is it just me, or does the UDK colormap lose resolution in UDK? I don't know what to do at this point, so if anyone is gracious enough to share their knowledge with me; I'd be deeply grateful.
Sincerely,
Cory Kanakis
Firstly, what exactly is the problem you are encountering with your normal map in UDK? Is it not showing? Is it displaying artifacts? If possible show a photo of the problem (never hurts).
Secondly, you could probably use higher resolution textures. Go to cgtextures.com and download some textures (as massive as possible, you can downsize them if needed) that are relatively uniform color and have only minimal directional lighting information (which can and will mess with the normal creation if not scrubbed out). Clean them up (make generic textures like the wood siding and roof slates tile seamlessly) in your photo editing software of choice (e.g. gimp or photoshop.) Create normals maps (if you want) using a plugin for your photo editing software or another program like b2m or crazybump.
Lastly, you're making good progress. Keep it up, buddy.
(Sorry for any gibberish and nonsensical sentences, I was just about to go to sleep)
interesting, I've been looking for an application to replace CrazyBump for years. I thought B2M REQUIRES the Substance Designer, so, its quite expensive.
For the indie version, B2M is locked to Substance Player (a free application that runs substances). If you use the professional version, B2M is a standalone substance and can be ran in any program that supports substances like Unity and Substance Designer. Its obviously more convenient when it runs in Substance Designer because you don't have to bounce around between programs but it certainly isn't a make or break problem. It's definitely worth trying if you ask me.
1. follow the silhouette of your concept, it is has a lot more juanty angles and interesting bending/warping of walls and roofs etc
2. create some cleaner more high res textures as clusterone suggests, then customise these to fit the style better(highlights on edges, scrapes and scratches or whatever)
3. make sure the scale of everything is right, yes its a fantasy world but if bricks look massive in one wall and small in another it becomes less believable.
have a look at stuff like this for some material/texture inspiration http://www.tabletop-world.com/timberedHouse.php
This thread has helped me so much, I don't have words for. Without this thread, I'd be annoying my contacts for information; so whoever can help me with this issue; I will be in your debt. The issue is that I have not used the right material for the roof according to the concept. Would I get fired over this? I went through a ton of editing on the roof to get rid of nsided polygons and to add depth by raising random tiles. Do I need to throw away all that work to fit it to concept or should I keep it the way it is? My gut tells me I need to start over on the roof. Anyway, everyone is a genius in their own way. I am hoping one of the 3D geniuses, hopefully watching this thread, will have some constructive advice/knowledge about how to deal with this situation.
Gratefully yours,
Cory Kanakis
That said, I think all of the textures and UV mapping could use a complete overhaul. The model itself looks pretty good but the texture work and misaligned UVs are really bringing it down from where it could be.
I'd throw them away and start from a nice new base for the textures, using clearer, higher resolution images for your sources. We're in the days of 1024x1024 and higher multiple textures so don't focus too much on using optimized textures at this stage, focus more on getting the quality down first. And a thing to keep in mind is it is easy to simply compress and scale down an image from say 1024 to 512 or 256, but you can't really make a texture made with 256x256 pixels look good blown up as a 1024x1024 texture.
The roof texture is your primary culprit since it's the most obvious. There is a lot of image noise and artifacts in it that shouldn't be there. (Those random white dots and the random green/red/yellow pixels, which is from using too low a quality or resolution texture)
Usually if your gut is telling you something is wrong, it probably is wrong. And that's a good thing to have happen because it means you're able to critique your own work and figure out what you can do to improve, which is a skill within itself. So good job on that and keep it up!
Thank you good fellow,
Sincerely,
Cory Kanakis
Sure, it's probably overused as a source, but it'll get the job done in finding some higher res photos to use as your base. I'd however recommend doing a little bit more work on changing them up in photoshop, such as tiling them yourself rather than downloading the pre-tiled ones, adding in additional details, tweaking color, mixing different source samples together, etc.
By doing all of that you'll help yourself more in the long run by learning how to do tasks such as creating a seamless tiling texture from a photograph if you haven't already, which you'd probably be doing anyways since I'm sure alot of studios mix between their own library of photographs and paying a couple of guys to go out into the wild with their cameras.
Here's a little fun video of some of the behind the scenes stuff when Bethesda made Oblivion which was one of my inspirations in wanting to work on games growing up. I include it because of the few samples they show in how they themselves will physically go out and photograph some of their own primary sources which is always the best if it's possible to do so. http://youtu.be/zvm0CN3tQFI?t=13m11s
Thank you for the inspiration. I'm thinking of redoing the roof with a higher resolution version. It's throwing away about a days worth of work, but .....well....I guess I'm a perfectionist. I hope to be able to make progress on this while school is in session. Your video was very interesting. Looking for your own textures in the environment sounds like a great idea. Also, I'm going to Raid cgtextures.com for high rez and I know how to make tileable textures; so that's fine. Thank you for all your advice/knowledge. Seriously, I am very grateful that you spent time reading through my issue.
Thank you sir!
Sincerely,
Cory Kanakis
My skills fall flat in producing portfolio level textures; so it is my hope that some genius texture artist happen to read this fairly important "help wanted" message. I could experiment first, but getting the right advice from a well trained texture master would speed things up. Essentially, my issue is with the attached documents. It has come to my attention that the roof of the concept building is composed of wood shingles. There might be some high rez shingles on the internet, but my concern is with developing texture artist skill and not merely using a raw photograph. Should I paint over the asphalt roofs that have been collected over the internet? Is that how it is done? As you will understand from reading this document so far is that my head is very confused and full of frustration. Hopefully someone will know how to deal with this situation. There are alot of talented people on this thread; so I have no doubts that this problem will be collaboratively solved.
With Sincere Respect,
Cory Kanakis
I am having alot of trouble with this texture as I have never seen one like this before. I am referring to the concept presented in the attachment section. This guy isn't indicating whether it's wood, brick, stone, shingles, or anything else. Anyway, I was wondering if any of you reading this woulld help guide me in the right direction?
Sincerely,
Cory Kanakis
http://www.cgtextures.com/texview.php?id=8854&PHPSESSID=9u6pb1liq5jhtgmrlnsrser0e7
what made me pick this texture? well it looks aged and it doesnt look machine made and it looks like houses Ive seen in real life and google reference like this http://www.kathieberg.com/sites/default/files/Period_Revival_Oakland_CA.jpg
you may need to paint over your texture and rework a few times by the end so that it fits well with all the other textures. Its all part of the process. Enjoy yourself and make something that you like and know that nobody gets it right first time.
Thank you for bringing me out of my cryostatis in decision making. I'm going to go ahead and use the textures you supplied as best I can. I was just freaking out because I didn't know what the hell the material was made out of. I didn't know you could interpret the concept so easily as you have done. Thank you good sir! I very much appreciate it. Now, I can move forward.
You might want to check out: ( http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=137096 ) there are a few awesome tutorials that might be relevant to your interest there. Good luck!
Having trouble making the final render as clear as it is in the actual workspace.