Crappucino's Thread of Low-Poly & Hand-Painted Texture Improvement

Crappuccino

Hello, everyone.

As the title states, this will be my attempt at properly improving my modeling and texturing skills. Hopefully the potential embarrassment of me leaving this thread to die from inactivity will be enough motivation to keep me going. My goal is to finish something at least once a week.

Feedback, criticism and all that is greatly appreciated!

So to start off, here's a small scene I made tonight (I'll post WIPs starting from the next thing I make):



PS: If you're also in the process of learning (who isn't though?), feel free to send me a personal message with your Steam and I'll add you. I'd love to have someone to share thoughts and learn together with!

Crappuccino

Here's a low-poly Roman soldier I modelled last night:



I will start with the texture later today.

Crappuccino

Alright, I finsihed the texture. I'm not 100% happy with it and it probably needs a bit more polishing. For some reason I have yet to figure out, I feel as if the texturing isn't consistent throughout the scene, almost as if several people of varying skills had worked on it together. It probably comes down to my still lacking ability of producing things of even quality. It might even be a problem of the proportions of the other models not being as stylized as the character model is. In retrospect I probably should have made them (the shield in particular) much less plain looking and more bulky and interesting.

Anyway, I've definitely learned a thing or two from making this character, so I think I'll move on to something else now. Here's the final result:

Crappuccino

Tried creating a small viking longhouse. Pretty happy with the model. Somewhat happy with the texture, but I suspect it's looking too monochrome. Excuse the lazy grass texture but I really wanted to get this thing done before dinner. I really need to put more effort into the presentation of the next thing I do because so far it has all been put together rather hastily. And also, again, I forgot to post any WIPs of this project. I tend to just do these smaller scenes in one go and forget about WIPs. I'll make something bigger next time so I can show more of the process.

pmiller001

I think you understand whats up with the log cabin, it looks very bland right no. Change it up a bit, throw on some interesting splotches of color, or maybe some vines or something growin in the cracks. The first thing you posted (the table with the knife) is the best one so far.

pigart

What pmiller001 said is right. I'd also suggest throwing in some gradients over the textures.

Also, check out hue shifting. It can really make your textures look rich with colors.

Crappuccino

Hey, thanks to the both of you for your comments. I definitely agree and I'll keep what you said in mind for next time.

I did a quick face practise before bed. I was feeling some momentum from this afternoon and I didn't want to lose it. I like low-poly stuff so my goal was to be as careful as possible with the polycount. It ended up having 124 polygons. The texture turned out decent, I think. I used to find texturing faces incredibly hard but now it's fairly easy to get an OK result (it's obviously no where near the level of quality I want to reach eventually). There's some UV distortion around the eye that I noticed afterwards and the ear turned out ugly, otherwise I'm fairly content.

Crappuccino

I didn't really know what to do for my next project, so I sat down yesterday and made a medieval character in hopes of getting some inspiration. Then I had the idea of creating a small outpost scene/diorama kind of thing for him, so that's what I'm going to do now.

Since this is the first real ambitious handpainted low-poly thing I make, I appreciate any and all comments. What I'm already aware of and will change is the very dark AO around the opening of the glove and the distortion in the gambeson pattern on his back.

taotang

Looking great so far!

Crappuccino

Thanks, Taotang.

Today I didn't have enough spare time to do anything big, but I managed to model a couple of things for the character.

Crappuccino

I managed to abandon this thread sooner than I had expected, but in my defense I was busy releasing a game (plus, I forgot my graphic tablet when I moved). I will eventually come back to the medieval diorama thing that I started some posts back and finish it.

At the moment I'm working on another project. Here's a WIP of one of the characters. Currently experimenting with this semi-mannequin look.