Hand painted environment

MattyWS

Hello everyone! I usually lurk here and make the odd post but thought I'd show some WIP textures. My ultimate here is to make a nice Dota (kind of) environment so I started off with some attempts at hand painted textures. I did use 3D to help me with the stone floor though. Critique is more than welcome! I'm a complete noob in 2D.

MattyWS

So I haven't touched on this in a while as I was hoping for some feedback but I guess I just didn't really show enough in context, so I made a fast test scene (the tree doesn't match, it's quite old actually so I need to replace it).

Tell me what you guys think! I'd much like to hear some feedback on how to improve because I'm still new to hand painted styles.

Tobbo

This is looking cool.

I would work some more on the darker parts of the grass. There's no grass blades, dirt, or anything in those areas. It's just a dark blob. Maybe try and fill it in a little bit more? I understand that you don't want to make it too noisy though, but I think a little more indication of grass blades or something would definitely help.

Justin Meisse

It's looking pretty good so far, I look forward to seeing more.

Deathstick

nothing wrong with using 3D to help you with hand-painted environment textures, I think that's what Blizzard has been doing these days anyways.

Looking good!

Dragonar

I like it !! Maybe the floor is a little repetitive especially hollow but with some grass it will be nice !

Mr Significant

The grass looks astonishing

turpedo

Looks great so far! I would suggest figuring out a way to make your stone tile look more weathered and unorganized. It feels very straight and organized in the environment screenshot.

Chimp

Lovely work so far.

Whilst I do agree with the above regarding the stone texture, I must say that my problem with it lies more with how it blends into the grass, it doesn't feel particularly strong - its a soft fade - I think you might want to come up with a better way of transitioning, or perhaps hiding it somehow.

Edit: well actually it seems fine toward the right of the image, but terrible in the bottom left - perhaps tidy that area up a bit.

DireWolf

Looks real nice. How did you blend the grass and tiles together?

MattyWS

Tobbo wrote: »

This is looking cool.

I would work some more on the darker parts of the grass. There's no grass blades, dirt, or anything in those areas. It's just a dark blob. Maybe try and fill it in a little bit more? I understand that you don't want to make it too noisy though, but I think a little more indication of grass blades or something would definitely help.

Thanks! Yes I need to make a darker grass, as the moment you are correct, it's just basically a dark colour with no grass blades defined. I planned on making a normal grass, dark grass, dirt, slabstone and a broken version of the slabs to break up the tiling a bit more.

Then come decals like flower patches and grass geometry to put between the slabs and up against objects to make them sit in the world better.

Justin Meisse wrote: »

It's looking pretty good so far, I look forward to seeing more.

Thanks! I'll be working on this alongside speedtree for Unity to get a nice scene going. =D

Deathstick wrote: »

nothing wrong with using 3D to help you with hand-painted environment textures, I think that's what Blizzard has been doing these days anyways.

Looking good!

Indeed, the the stone floor I did actually originally make it in Max and took to Zbrush, rendered out and heavily painted over. The gass was done in photoshop only though, modelling and tiling grass in Max sounded a bit annoying. xD

Dragonar wrote: »

I like it !! Maybe the floor is a little repetitive especially hollow but with some grass it will be nice !

Thanks! I think I may actually remake the floor now I know what I'm doing, I can make it less tiled and also make another broken variation to blend it.

Mr Significant wrote: »

The grass looks astonishing

Thank you very much. ^_^

turpedo wrote: »

Looks great so far! I would suggest figuring out a way to make your stone tile look more weathered and unorganized. It feels very straight and organized in the environment screenshot.

Thanks. I think you are right, needs to be broken up a lot so I'm taking it back to the drawing board.

Chimp wrote: »

Lovely work so far.

Whilst I do agree with the above regarding the stone texture, I must say that my problem with it lies more with how it blends into the grass, it doesn't feel particularly strong - its a soft fade - I think you might want to come up with a better way of transitioning, or perhaps hiding it somehow.

Edit: well actually it seems fine toward the right of the image, but terrible in the bottom left - perhaps tidy that area up a bit.

Thank you!. Agreed, my blending could have been better but I just wanted to set up a scene to check tiling and blending. I think one of my issues may also be that the grass has a direction so blending on one direction is easier than the other, and it starts to look inconsistent. ; ;

DireWolf wrote: »

Looks real nice. How did you blend the grass and tiles together?

Thanks! The blending is just Unity terrain painting but I think later on I'm going to use ShaderForge to make decent way of blending the textures in a more dynamic way, I need to look up how they did it for Dota.

Grindigo

Rounded cobblestones would work greatly instead of these stone slabs and you can also make some dirt texture to go around it and in turn it will transition to grass nicely.

MattyWS

Ok so based on some feedback and my own realization, I started redoing the grass tonight from scratch in a different way that could allow me to make variations and also to make it non-directional like the last one. It's a WIP and hasn't taken long to do this grass, about 30 minutes actually! All vectors. I will do a bit more art and make it look pretty but its a good tiling base.

Sage

awesome work!!!! make more

MattyWS

Thanks Sage.

So after some colour balancing and making a new scene in Unity (I got all excited and made a wall as well.. Needs a decent Zbrushing but it's all blocked out for now). I think A nice touch will be to add grass planes coming out of the ground around the walls and in cracks in the ground but I need to make some variations of my textures first. Especially the slabs. And new trees soon to come. I have SpeedTree to play with in Unity so this should be fun!

Also, first time using baked normal maps on a model in Unity.. What effort that was! So much learned about the whole process and using Handplane.

WadeWT

This is looking lovely so far! I kind of preferred your original grass, though. The new one looks more like hay to me. It's a bit less disorganised I think. Grass planes will add so much also!

Fenyce

Nice improvement so far! Keep up the great work!

MattyWS

Thanks guys!

WadeWT, I do agree that the grass is looking a bit like hay. I'm hoping when I make softer and darker variations it will make the grass blades look less 'stiff' and harsh. I also need to paint over them too, so hopefully giving a softer look will make it looks more like grass again. Only time can tell I guess!

iangoold3d

Looking Great! I am also working on my hand painted skills,
Would you mind showing a breakdown of your trees?
also do you have any recommendations for good hand-painting tutorials ?

anyways.... looking really good so far! keep it up!

MattyWS

Thanks iangoold3d, I don't really have anything to show for that tree, I made it years ago it's just placeholder in this scene for the moment. All I did to make it was stack some cones on each other for the model, as for the texture I basically just made a couple of branch-like green textures and stacked them in a radial pattern (UV was planar from the top down). I don't really even remember how I did the texture specifically but it was done using a mouse rather than graphics tablet. xD I was a noob back then and got hand cramps using pens.

As for tutorials, I used this to begin with and stole the idea of using gradients from someone here on the forums (Thanks btw);

iangoold3d

Awesome! thanks for the reply!
Cant wait to see this project grow!

MattyWS

A little bit more, I added 2 more grass variations (not really noticable in this image) and grass planes in 3D. It's quite hard to get the grass planes right. I edited the normals in Max to face directly up and use transparent/cutout shader in Unity but may have to make my own shader, because backfaces are culled. =(

MattyWS

Thought I'd try orthographic/isometric view, added some flowers and spent a bit of time seeing what I could do with grass planes. Want to work on the tree next but I just realised it's 6:45am on a week day. >.<

rodstone

MattyWS wrote: »

Thought I'd try orthographic/isometric view, added some flowers and spent a bit of time seeing what I could do with grass planes. Want to work on the tree next but I just realised it's 6:45am on a week day. >.<

I love this!

MattyWS

rodstone wrote: »

I love this!

Thanks Rodstone.

Now I'm back from being social I might actually be able to start on a tree. I think I'll struggle mostly with bark textures. =( I'm trying to keep everything modular as well so I can re-use things.

CBolyer

Lots of good stuff here! Really find your grass and stones successful in the scene. May want to retouch the leaves a bit as they feel a bit flat at the moment.

tonyd927

Great stuff! Really like your handpainting skills! (can I borrow some?)