Monthly HandPaint Art Jam March 2015
polycounter lvl 8
Noobs and Character Artists can have their challenge, so do we! However we've decide on keeping it simple and friendly, and instead of making it a challenge, we're making it an Art Jam. A place where Handpainter can exchange technique, critique and tricks.
We welcome any cartoon concept artist that would like to join us too !
- There's no restriction on the software or technique you use. You're a free to use brush and bake map. Our goal here is to get better and share workflow. We won't accept any war between oldschool and newschool and what is handpaint.
- The use of photo is strictly forbidden.
- The use of heavily photobash brush is also forbidden. Remember the goal here is to PAINT.
- The final output should only use diffuse, alpha and glow map. No Normal, spec or bump is allowed on the model itself. However using those map as a base for your painting is allowed.
- This is an Art jam so don't use existing stuff, there's no point in it. Re-using asset is tolerate to a certain point, use your good sense.
- Everything have to be your work, no stealing. Collab are allowed as long as your teammates are part of polycount !
- You have to post WIP of your work, the main goal of this, is to learn, so no final product only.
- We encourage you to post your texture map as well as the model
- If you participate, you have to post at least a critique on someone else work.
"You have lived all your life in a land where ancient Celtic castles of mighty stone loom over fields of lush green grass. The upland bogs provide peaty fuel to warm your bones through a wet winter, but you have always heeded your mother's advice not to go up to the bogs at night, lest you lose your way or fall victim to the many monsters and animals that might lurk therein. The land gives off the air of old legends crushed underfoot by the tide of Catholicism, and while few make it their creed, many still believe that faeries and changelings roam the realm, out of sight but subtly influencing daily life."
In honour of the month of march, our first theme will be: Ireland !
Character: Anything from the Irish folklore ! Be sure to not mix it up with England. You can do your own interpretation of them.
Props: Any Emblematic object of Ireland! It could be anything from religious artifact to food to a good-luck charm
Environment: Ireland is known for it's beautiful lands of green, nice cottage house, enchanted forest, I'm sure you'll come up with something
Join our Skype community group by adding me to your skype: LadyOdow . Please add that you're from polycount
Check out our Moodboard, where you can find useful information or idea, on Pinterest ! Ireland Inspiration Board
Check out everything you need to know about color and light on our tips board
Check out final submission on our submission Pinterest Board !
Replies
Edit: I'm also told that Fairies and Unicorns are fair game.
Ireland is a fantastic place that people doesn't know that much, it's the occasion to learn more about it !
I'd like to get some more coloring into it..
The thing I don't understand is why no normal mapping?
The goal here is to further the painting skill not the sculpture/modeling one. We want people to go back to the basic, paint the light and highlight, paint the occlusion, paint the spec. People here wills pend more time talking about the diffuse than everything else.
Haindpaint is known to have only one texture map : a diffuse. (with alpha and glow if necessary) the rest is all faked in the painting. That also why the use of photo is forbidden.
This is an example of what the artstyle required for this artjam: https://www.pinterest.com/mallorywikoff/hand-painted-textures/ you can see that some of them are more realistic, other really cartoon, but the handpainting feel is always there. Also you can see how AO map are allow as a base for the painting and not directly apply on the model.
Good luck to everyone !
I can't decided what i'm going do to for environment yet, so many pretty thing and idea >3< So I did a little speed props, i'll texture it later today or tomorrow morning.
I went with a classic Horse Shoe, to challenge myself i'll maybe try to paint it gold, it's going to be a good painting practice since gold is more complex that what people tends to think.
Oh, were we not to use photo reference at all? I used the above image for color picking, but nothing more.
I've actually started over on my texture from scratch, I didn't like how washed out it looked..
Colorpick often result in dull color.
I'm actually impress that you did such a realistic texture without using picture :O If you don't mind, i would like to see your psd file (don't worry if it's messy, mine are too haha) to learn your workflow ^-^ I'm really into cartoon but i'd like to be able to handpaint more realistic stuff too.
Keeping it simple to start and then might do something else next.
Shame the topic isn't Wales... would have seen a lot of sheep
Ok my reference:
We are supposed to show WIP?
and where I'm at:
Just blocking in some shapes.
There is not much to the textures yet: I just wanted to set the basic colors first. I think I like the one in the middle most:
As for any critique to the work so far I don't think there is much to say, since you are all at the very beginning. The bread looks awsome and I am really looking forward to the process of the other pieces.
Have fun everyone!
I like part of all 3 of them haha
I like the red undershirt, the yello striped sock and bow, but i prefer the green from the first one.
So here are my concept and texture references for the character:
I started with a low poly block out, sculpted on it in zbrush, baked down the normal and AO, then the rest was painting.
Here's the high poly and bakes:
And here's my photoshop file:
I try to keep them as clean as I can. I used the normal to generate a cavity map and used the green channel for directional light. I also baked out a point light map in maya.
Like before, I used the reference image for color picking, but the second time around I used it less and went with more saturated colors.
My blockout so far:
I'm going to make it look more chubby like the second pic.
@Uberren : Awh cute squirrel, that's just my personal preference but i would make the tail a big bigger. Squirrel with huge tail are so cute.
Here's my diorama concept
inspired by this photo
The squirrel is very quite, i am curious how your texture will look like.
The boating scene could be interesting, will you make that stuff engine ready?
I'll give this cottage a shot
Gonna try Deirdre.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deirdre
I am not someone who dwells on the concept too long, so I just sketched out her proportions and started working.
There's not much on how Deirdre is supposed to look besides 'yellow tresses, green eyes, cheeks coloured like foxglove(which is a plotpoint)' The way she would dress is particularly an issue, as her history is from around the first century, and in general it's tricky to find the right clothes. (Especially because the 'Leine', the oddly sleeved dress she's wearing below, is a staple of early Irish clothing, but also a staple of bad fantasy art, making it difficult to believe)
Some links for those doing irish myth heroes:
http://www.academia.edu/1488040/Celtic_Clothing_During_the_Iron_Age-_A_Very_Broad_and_Generic_Approach
http://www.doyle.com.au/irishkilts.html
http://www.celticgarb.org/clothing/main.html
Meanwhile, I'll be revising my concept further, because apparently early Irish women wore 'Peplos' or Bogdresses of all things...
@KustomZero that cottage is so pretty *_* are you going to do the foliage on the wall with a tile texture or with planes ?
@Wolthera You could gave her Venetian blonde hair. It's not yellow but it's blond and red hair at same time, plus it would look really beautiful in handpaint. Maybe some celtic embroidery on the dress itself, something subtitle but who still add something to it !
I can't wait to see everyone art ^- I'm glad that theme inspired all of you guys !
Still figuring out the color palette, and the mood i want to deliver.
@Odow i call dibs on this one
I started with simple thing (pot of gold)
that is what i did for now:
Using photoshop to paint and then reloading it in modo to see what it looks like.
Yeah, its pretty hard to tell what you've got going on. But judging by your colors, your UV layout might need to be adjusted. The pot seems like it takes up a lot less space than the food inside. The green parts also seem disconnected from each other. You might be able to save yourself a bunch of headaches, in the future, by laying things out differently.
@Gadorian: I'm diggin this scene style, would be cool to see this turning out into a dirty swamp or something similar
Looking forward for the texture work guys.
Also you choose use imgur to host your picture, then use the [*img][*/img] balise, your picture will have better quality and it will be easier for people to look at
Well. Here's my crummy concept for a Dullahan.
Probably gonna use a character mesh I've been tinkering with for a while now to get going a little quicker since I'm going to need to spend a lot of energy to figure out the horse problem.
@darkmag07 Is there a particular problem with the horse that makes it hard to model?
@Moosebish I don't really understand the how to UV correctly. I failed the last monthly noob challenge in that I had a model, but when I went to UV everything was a mess. Modelling is a lot more fun, than texturing.
This is my current UV for the pot
My general idea is the side of the pot can share the same UV space as they won't have any individual details, but the food at the top needs its own UV space because I'm going to add specific detail to it.
However, I had the same idea for the monthly noob thread last month and ended up with horrible mess below and couldn't progress.
I feel like you are wasting a lot of space on your UV map. Since the soup is the most important part, it should take up the most space. Right now it's 25% of your texture. That's actually pretty good, but you could get away with more and still have things look nice.
What are those two big red blobs? I'm guessing that one is the outside of the pot. Is the other the inside of it? If so, why did you make the inside of the pot at all? Did you intend to make a scene with multiple pots in different states of being eaten? Even so, does the inside of the pot need to take up that much space?
What you need to "practice" is realizing which parts of the model are a focal point, and warrant more texture space, and which parts are not.
I took the liberty of modeling out a simple pot and demonstrating how I would setup the UV map. In coming to this point I first made sure all my islands had equal density. Then I picked out the part that was most important, the soup and increased the size by ~1.5. Since that made the map too big, I took all the other, less important parts and resized them to fit around the soup (they ended up being ~75% of their original size).
Unless you're going to move around the extra floating geometry in the soup, there's no point in separating them from the main UV map. In this case I would project it from top view and then relax the UVs on anything that didn't project well from that direction.
(As for the noob challenge, I think you didn't take into account tiling textures? Not every part of a building should be included on a single UV map. There would be separate layouts for the parts made of stone, parts made of wood, and so forth.)
I should really make a full UV mapping tutorial as there are tons of things I feel like aren't taught very well.
Edit: Yay grammar!
In general, when it comes to the type of texturing that is not being done via projection painting, uv deformation is not as important as clean uvs, and straight lines are more important than efficient UV-space use. It's a bit about taking care of your sanity as well as the quality
My progress is going pretty well, even though I went back to the concept(I painted over an orthographic of the model, I tried to record it, but my computer is a little sluggish and froze, so I couldn't get the whole process)
Anyway, I now know what I want to do with the dress and clothes in terms of patterns(she's gonna have an intertwined tree pattern on her dress because the story says she and her lover had trees growing over their graves that intertwined) and shape. Will start UVing next once I'm done poking the model some more. (hands, feet, applying the mirror modifier and then model in some asymmetry)
@darkmag07: Sure thing, usually when I'm stuck on how to spruce things up(esp with a generic design like this one), I research period costume, because there's always something interesting you can try. Looks like you'll be having your work cut out for you though
@Odow: thanks, I'll consider it, but I am wary of turning her into a ginger, because stereotypes. I'm not averse to experimentation though.
Well here's where my character is at. I'm trying to decide if I should give her some more accessories or not. Some kind of bone/skull themed armor or something to go along with the spinal cord whip (not yet modeled). Her sleeves are gonna be a pain to deal with based on my experience with the Riot Art Contest.
(And yes, the head detaches at the neck for those wondering.)
I finally got the 3D model for my Leprechaun Lady done. Next stept would be to watch tutorials on proper UV mapping ^^. Fortunately you already put some advise on that in this thread.
darkmag07: I think the upper part of the arms (almost where it touches the torso) is a bit tiny. It seems to be smaller then the lower part. Other than that I really like the charakter and your concept. Would love to see the armor you suggested.
The two things I see that you should aim for are :
- more consistent mesh density : Parts like the hat or lower jacket tend to alternate between tight and large loop rows which isn't good as far as posing your character goes. The more even geometry you have, the smoother your cloth will look when posing, and there'll be less risk of stuff clipping through other stuff when you deform the mesh.
- more efficient vertex/edge distribution : best example is the knee joint, you'll see that there are a lot of edges on the back view that serve no purpose. You shouldn't hesitate to put triangles where they won't alter mesh animation, because otherwise you're wasting vertexes on big loops that you could have saved to get a smoother silhouette on different angles. If you look at your model from a perspective viewpoint, you might notice some anatomy parts will look a bit rigid.
here's a set of useful references for low-poly anatomy : https://www.pinterest.com/psjhhh/%EC%99%80%EC%9D%B4%EC%96%B4/
So let's do this right. I opened a new thread in which I post updates of the model, since this thread here is about handpainted stuff. I will be back posting here, when I am finished with the modelling part.
Here is the Link:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=149739
I quoted your advice in my first post. I hope that's fine with you!?
@josfield the sketch is amazing
well I get to this point , is there any problem in uv?