Advice about texture

AutoExit

Hi. I was working on some rocks. The work was not accepted because of textures :poly122:. Can you tell me what's wrong with them, what i must learn to improve their quality etc? Please be harsh if this can make me learn.

grimsonfart

Reason it looks bad is because you can't just slap a rock texture on to a mesh and expect it too look good. Secondly the texture you have chosen does not flow well with the type of rock you are going for, it's more of a cliff material. Find a texture which is more flat and generic, will probably work much better.

Secondly, if you want a rock to look really good, you should look into unwrapping it and creating a custom sheet for it, so that you can create unique details much easier than using a tileable texture. Only downfall with this method is it takes more time and if the rock gets too big the texture resolution will suffer.

Using tileable textures is a good method though and should not be tossed out the window. Here is a video that might help you out. If you decide to use tileable textures you will certainly need some kind of material blending, such as moss or a different rock texture to give it some variation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaT-EeYLn5Y&list=UUMXDRABjjd6McLiwnBikLLA

Here he goes trough using tileable textures in a PBR workflow. He uses CryEngine though..

What engine are you using? I could give more guidlines if you actually use CE3 because i use it too.

AutoExit

Thanks for the answer. I use Unity engine. Tileable texture is a must because of texel density. I must texture it with diffuse, no PBR.

luthyn

Did you only make the color and normal maps?

I agree with everything that grimsonfart said, for this it would probably be bettern to make a unique texture. Do you have any other assets you can put beside it for size reference?

If you are really married to the idea of a tiling texture, Philip K has a good tutorial about working with modular rocks that might be applicable to this:

http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/modular_rocks/modular_rocks.html

What program are you using to make the textures?

AutoExit

Yes i have made only diffuse and normal maps. I have already seen that tutorial but it seems that i haven't applied all goodness from it. I use Photoshop.

martinszeme

I think you got couple issues there. As previously said the texture doesn't really fit lumpy, boulder like stones. It would fit more for a cliff face. Also whenever you apply it and then rotate around the rock it looks odd because of the uniform layering of different sediment in the stone.
Other thing is the scale of the texture. Some of the stones have larger, some smaller tiling and in general it looks like its tiling too much. Might just be me

Also the texture is very monochromatic. It has that reddish colour with some darker brown and thats pretty much it. Would be nice to have some variation in tone and also value.

Couple things you could do:
Vertex painting to give some texture detail here and there. Couple that with couple nice decals and it should break it up a bit.

Also are you using any reference? If so, could you please post it here.

lotet

lots of smart things mentioned here.
but it also looks like your normal map is inverted.

AutoExit

Yes, this was my main reference: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=98332
The model of rock has got vertex painting on it, it's a sand on tops of pieces of rock. Other thing is that i cant use vertex paint in Unity.

BagelHero

Did you check out their actual workflow for that scene in Vertex? Check that out here: http://artbypapercut.com/

I mean, yes, they did use tiling textures, but they seem more thoughtfully done than this (not to mention they knew that their final product could have vertex blending and fancy shaders). They have a number of Naughty Dog articles in a row, including that exact scene and then two texture planning and execution articles. They used appear to have used zBrush to make their tiling texture.

BTW, your normal map doesn't match the curves that the photo represents. It does look a little inverted, but flipping it likely wont fix all the issues.