Low Poly Hand-Painted Sack

Phrisk

Hello everyone! First post on Polycount.

A year ago I took my first Zbrush class, and made a coin sack as my first model ever. Not sure what inspired it but i will share it:


It ended up being more like a sack of cylinders.

Anyway, It's winter break and decided to re-visit it. I've spent the year doing all sorts of different types of modeling and styles in school and now I've decided to pursue hand-painted low poly assets. I'm always inspired by the Torchlight games.

Here's my re-work. I'd love critique, as I am new to this style.

Cheeky_Pickle

Heya looks great! I'd be careful around the lip of the bag where the coins are spilling out, due to being low poly the coins are just a clump and it makes it obvious by having them tipping out. I'd say add more geometry to refine these few coins pushing out or just move them back a little to get rid of that edge.

Noren

Looking good, but it sits between chairs.
"Hand painted" seems to refer only to the diffuse and you kept the baked normals, although they and the painted parts are clearly different in some areas like the grass.
Some parts have dark shadows painted in, while others like the grass or coins lack shadows.
(Unless you are going for completely baked shadows, the opposite case would make sense: Painted/baked shadows for details which are only in the texture and realtime shadows for actual 3d elements like from the bag on the ground. Maybe some lighter AO for the bag.)

As for the textures themselves I think they look ok for an early try.
Right now they are a bit inconsistent. The dirt looks sharp and photo sourced, the grass is pretty blurry and the bag has little surface information at all. (The bag actually isn't looking bad in the sense of a cartoon/plastic look, but the pedestal doesn't match that style.)

edit: As for the normals discrepancy: I'd either go for a completely prelit texture or would create a normalmap for the painted detail as well.

Phrisk

@Holly Mellor Definitely something to think about, thanks!

@Noren Thanks for the detailed critique. definitely agree with everything. I've never done grass before so i brought it into Substance Painter and just kind of swished around with the brush. I would like more shadows within the grass to match the bag. Also i'd like to get the bag to look more like leather/suede. As for the normals, I kept them because the rocks looks flat otherwise, but I think I will have to learn to paint them to not look flat. I will try to mess around without the normals.