Hand Painted Glory or... not.
polycounter lvl 5
Hello there!
I'm really trying to get good enough to go freelance with environment and props and i'd love to do it in the hand painted style.
With that in mind, i'm going to try and paint this house (model based on original concept by Arthur Gimaldinov) using tileable and unique textures.
Please, PLEASE help if you can and weigh in to point out where it's not working or thoughts or theories or crits or comments or anything, really. I want to get better and i'm willing to do the work and rework.
OK, so this is where i'm starting:
I'm really trying to get good enough to go freelance with environment and props and i'd love to do it in the hand painted style.
With that in mind, i'm going to try and paint this house (model based on original concept by Arthur Gimaldinov) using tileable and unique textures.
Please, PLEASE help if you can and weigh in to point out where it's not working or thoughts or theories or crits or comments or anything, really. I want to get better and i'm willing to do the work and rework.
OK, so this is where i'm starting:
Replies
I've made a repeating texture for the wooden siding/slats and feel like it's ok but it doesn't look like anything special. I started by painting a straight wood texture nd then overlayed that over a line drawing of the slats.
Hope you guys can see it ok:
Like i say, any help or crits would be excellent, please
General rule of thumb, if it's in light, colors get warmer (edges towards red's vicinty). If it goes into the shadow, cooler (edges towards blue's vicinity). This is a general rule of thumb, feel free to play around with it for other effect.
@JadeEyePanda - Thanks very much for the guidance! I messed around with the colours a bit and have come up with this new update. I know that the highlights are going towards Cyan and the Shadows are goind towards deeper blue but it felt really weird when then highlights were going towards like a red/violet kind of thing. That could well be my own undeveloped eye, though. Please let me know what you think!
New Texture:
Right now it looks like the paneling is more blue than in the concept
nice silhouettes you have in your first post.
The birds are a great touch.
What are your plans for the terrain/ground ?
@Mistry - Thanks very much! I think i'm going to sculpt a ground plain roughly and put some grass cards in. Beyond that i think it'll be more a photoshop jobby kind of thing.
I feel like the wooden walls and the roof isn't gelling together and i'm not siure why. I've tried working it at different values and colours but they still seem to clash.
I'm aware that my colours are different to the concept but i'm not a fan of the sort of washed out green on the walls. Maybe that's why it looks weird?
Any crits or help would be great, thanks!
All the best!
I started the roof tiles from black and painted them from dark to light. Now you've said about the contrast, it's totally obvious i started too dark! I think maybe in future starting the whole thing with a base colour and base value which is either it's darkest or mid tone and then just paint from there.
I''ll bugger about with the levels and then do a paint over on the roof tiles.
Thanks again for helping
You are missing the underside/the thickness on your boards and maybe on the shingles, too. (Talking about the textures, now.)
Aside from the contrast, the sense of scale is off, too. It looks like you made the boards smaller for your latest shots, departing from the illustrative look of the concept. (If anything, I'd scale some of the boards up, compared to the concept.)
I've changed the model to the current point but i feel like any more distortion around the roof won't work at any other angle than the concept art.
Here is the model:
and i turned the lights off and applied ase colours over the different parts. There are 3 repeating textures (Roof Tiles, Chimney Stone and Wooden Siding) and 3 UV sheets. Here it is so far:
@Noren - i think you're right about the scale on the siding and will re-bigg'en it the next time xD Also, yes, in my efforts to lighten the contrast on the wood, i must have blown out the underside to the slats themselves. Definitely will watch that next time. Thanks very much for commenting!
I see that your using tiling textures, have you thought about doing it one to one? I think you will get nicer results and you will be able to pick out details and edges.
Iv adjusted the colours, so the wood paneling in the middle is more saturated and lighter, (you may think this is too bright but once you've got an AO over this should balance out.)
The other bits of wood are a warmer colour, The roof is a tad more blue. Iv also adjusted the colour on the doors / windows.
Iv painted in some bits that help the silhouette, like roof tiles around the edge, some brick work at the top.
I hope this helps, be nice to see it now with an AO bake over the top.
Made a few more alterations to the model (it has been en-squish-ened!), i've also gone, like you said, to UV 1 to 1 instead of tiling.
I've added a few suuuper simple gradients just as a tester but, here's what's kicking me in the fork: i can't seem to work out how to get multiple UV coordinate AO bakes. I tend to just get one and the rest of the sheets are jet black. Any help with that would be excellent!
If that proves to be too much of a clart on, i could always just paint them in by hand instead.
All the best and, as usual, thanks for comments and crits and help and everything.
Are you using Maya? Usually when i do AO bakes i duplcate the whole model, making sure its all one mesh, make sure everything is in the UV 1 to 1 space and not outside. Make sure there is no overlapping UV's, so say if you have a windows that are using the same uv, only bake down one of them, separate the others from the main mesh. Also put a plane underneath the model (raise the model slightly). Then try a bake. Hope that helps
I like your textures, but the work you put into achieving the hand painted look doesn't really come through in those images of the house. The detail gets lost with scale. You might want to consider how far away the viewer will be/how big the image will be/how many times the texture will be repeated so you can get the most out of your effort in your final renders.
You can also get more of a handcrafted look by getting rid of those last remaining 90° angles on the model.
I can see you have a bit of a scary haunted vibe going on there. The colours you're using suit that, but you might find a bit of warmth here and there help you maintain visual interest. Some scraped off paint on edges, dirt and cobwebs could help as well - but those are finishing touches.
Look forward to seeing the final!
So, i'll redo the UV's in Maya, bake out AO and then post up here when it's finally at that stage
@\\BlkOps - Thanks very much for helping out
@Sebeuroc - Thanks very much!
The UV's have been redone and all reduced down to 1x4k sheet! The plan is to paint it at 4k and scale down to 2k for the finished texture. I've baked out an AO for that sheet and am going to use it as a guide to paint in some coooler-coloured AO of my own. In the images, the green pieces are repeatable geometry. Any help, crits or comments are always welcome
Oh, i just want to say thanks again, FemCharles. Without that crit i woiuld've left the UVs as they were and unltimately the project would have suffered. Not now though, they're all on one sheet, woohoo!
And this is the UV sheet scaled down to 1k:
I still think your UV's could be much more efficient. If you straighten your uv edges it is a lot easier to fit it all together without wasting much space. Even organic things i tend to straightened off as much edges as possible.
But if you have started texturing or want to continue texturing, don't worry too much because as i said you can duplicate your model, create new uv and then just transfer your texture to the model with the new UV's.
Also when baking any maps, such as an AO, colourise it to pump some colour in or else your model texture will end up looking a bit dull!
I look forward to the update
OK, so, i'm trying not to get disheartened by my painting efforts on the stone. Some turned out ok and other turned out, well.... drunk, lazy 4 year old springs to mind. My grasp of colour seems to fly in the face of everything done so far so i'd really appreciate a slap of knowledge to get me back on track
Please ignore the rest of the texture for now; it's just there as a base to paint over. And thanks for all the help and patience so far in this.
Currently i think the stone too uniform in colour and lacks highlights, shadows and details.
I assume you've hand painted it from scratch, have you thought about doing a high poly sculpt and using some maps to start as a base for your hand painting process? You might find it easier.
Keep at it dude!