Critique wanted for handpainted swords

Serphantim

Hello everyone,

Been on this site for a year now and always impressed by the great stuff made on here.
I was hoping that you could give me some feedback on a set of handpainted swords I made so i could improve. The swords:
Wooden Sword (196 tris) & Stone Sword (426 tris)

Copper Sword (226 tris) & Silver Sword (446 tris)

Golden Sword (1020 tris) & Diamond Sword (1246 tris)

Runic Blade (460 tris) & Grand Runic Blade (460 tris)

Truesteel Blade (384 tris) & Enchanted Blade (806 tris)


Turntable test I did with the swords:
http://youtu.be/qfHgell1CZs

If you could take the time to give me some feedback that would be great.
Thanks in advance

lotet

I would suggest using concepts done by someone professional. right now you are struggling both with design And texturing. by picking an already existing concept you can focus on matching that. It will be a lot easier for you to measure progress, since you can look at the concept and compare where you are at. also you wont have to worry about the design phase, and can focus on one thing at a time, like getting the hand painted feel right.

the copper sword and silver sword are pretty good though, but I feel in all your weapons you dont really put any detail in the handle or other parts but the blade, they almost look like a plain color. another thing to work on is your color choices, you have very bright and saturated colors that kind of stings in the eye.

hope I wasnt to harsh on yah, good luck!

Serphantim

I'm fine with harsh comments especially if they are informative like yours. I always notice myself struggling with the handles, as you say they are rather boring and lack detail but most of my attempts on creating detail for them fail miserably. For the bright colors would it work to reduce the brightness on the textures for example? Didn't really think of them being too bright at first but I can see your point.

lotet

Serphantim wrote: »

I'm fine with harsh comments especially if they are informative like yours. I always notice myself struggling with the handles, as you say they are rather boring and lack detail but most of my attempts on creating detail for them fail miserably. For the bright colors would it work to reduce the brightness on the textures for example? Didn't really think of them being too bright at first but I can see your point.

great! I would suggest working with a limited palette rather then having the entire color wheel to your disposal. In Photoshop you can even extract color palettes from photos or other images, that way they will all have a unified scheme.

I still think you should find some existing concept to work from, then you can color pick/eyeball colors from the concept to get a better understanding about why they are the way they are.

lotet

I was just going to Pm you with this at first, but then It became more of an elaborate tutorial thingie, so I though Id just post it here so more people can see it.



here are the elements singled out that you are having problem with, which is basically everything(sorry for breaking it for you buddy xD).


Silhouette/Design.
se how you are working with very basic shapes but Firstkeeper in this case have much more dynamic and interesting silhouettes.

Color
in your model there are basicly only 3 colors, and they are very different from eachother, especially the blue, its really sticking out a lot and dosnt really make sense anyway, why would the blade be blue?

Value/contrast
here it becomes really obvious, when I turned them both black and white, you can see that your model is barely readeble while the other sword is still very much so.


working on all these things at the same time is really gonna hurt your progress and take a lot of your time. you need to practise all these things, but by using a premade concept you dont have to wory about design and color, and can focus on getting the hand painted style done, and while working with an existing concept you will learn the other 2 parts while your copying/studying the concept anyway

Dethling

@lotet: Really good summary (and tips!)
I would also suggest viewing the hand painted weapon tutorial by Tyson Murphy, it helped me a lot!

Serphantim

Damn man again great feedback, and don't worry about saying my stuff is bad :P. If I wanted nice feedback I would ask my friends. Atleast here at polycount people tell me the stuff I need to know to learn.

Still I can be a little stubborn so at the moment i'm trying to create one blade with an interesting silhouette to begin with and if that turns out bad I will try to recreate some work from the pros. Great stuff with the little mini tutorial, will try to learn as much from it as possible.

EDIT: @Dethling I already have that tutorial so going to rewatch that a couple of times

felipealves

It should help you a bit:

http://www.pinterest.com/felipealves3d/hand-painted-textures-artstudy/

Serphantim

@felipealves Cheers for that pinterest. Lot's of great stuff in there.

Serphantim

So after doing some work I got some new handpainted swords & shield. I tried to pay more attention to the values and saturation. Here is some of the work:



So the snakeblade (lack of a better name) came out pretty nicely I think but there is still some detail lacking on the blade parts which make it look a bit dull. The overal advice I got was to try and recreate some existing work so I stopped on the snakeblade and created the following shield based on :




With the shield I was happy with how the tentacles turned out but I absolutely hate how the gold part turned out and after redoing is 5 times I felt this was the best of the 5 attemps. I also made the mistake of uv unwrapping it and mirroring it. Because of this I can't add scratches properly as they will be mirrored as well.

Next up I used the concept for the shield and tried to create a sword in the same style:




I feel pretty happy about how this sword turned out but I still feel that there is plenty of room for improvement so if you have critiques or feedback please feel free to leave a comment

gilesruscoe

Sweet progress dude! Keep going!. You are still missing the brightest points on the metal work. Getting the specular highlights painted in properly will help a lot in defining their material. Your on the right track though, just keep painting and studying!