@Maher: I would straighten the horizontal and vertical edges in your UVs. I'm a stickler for aligned UVs. It's not as big a deal if you're 3D painting, but it makes things 100x easier if you're just using a 2D app like Photoshop.
(It looks like you're using Blender so if you press "w" in the UV/Image Editor it will open up the alignment menu and align your selection accordingly. The auto align, "a", works pretty well most of the time.)
I wish I could take credit for inventing the topology on the hands, but I've referenced a bunch of ripped game models and this one's topology is almost 100% copied from Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. It's actually already rigged and works pretty well. I'd rather keep the poly count low and deal with a little distortion. (It's not like this is an FPS and you'll be constantly looking at her hands!)
@Maher you will have a hard time painting on those wobbly uvs.
if i were you, i would delete a half of model (apart from the cap on top)
uv it, and straighten all lines
mirror back the missing parts
also, the straight uvs are much easier to paint on, and you will have no problem with aliasing if you were to scale down the texture for ingame usage
here's a quick paintover
edit: @darkmag07 If youre not cheating, youre not trying hard enough.
I'll be doing a cute irish leprechaun sheep with a pot of gold and rainbow, which is basically me, since my mother is obsess with sheep ( there's over 200 of them in my parents house) and my father is Irish ( 6th generation but w/e he's really proud of having an Irish name that no one can pronounce correctly). I doodle my concept and draw a better one tomorrow to show you
Cleaned up the hair geo. Also have pretty much everything UV mapped, I just need to decide on how many textures I want to use so I can fit the puzzle pieces together. I'm thinking face + hair, body, and eyes will each get their own maps.
Cleaned up the hair geo. Also have pretty much everything UV mapped, I just need to decide on how many textures I want to use so I can fit the puzzle pieces together. I'm thinking face + hair, body, and eyes will each get their own maps.
If you plan on using alpha transparency on the hair, I would recommend that you put the hair and the lashes on one map together, and put the face on the body map instead.
The reason for that is that the shader needed for alpha transparency will render all faces double-sided, which would be wasteful if it's applied to the character's face.
In general, it's more efficient to have less materials, so I would consider putting everything other than the hair on one map. Separating out the eye onto its own texture can still be a good workflow though, because then you can reuse the same eye texture for multiple characters in a game.
Made a simple celtic speedie, it's terrific to see people taking a interest in handpaints. Looking forward to seeing some fun characters, will definitely be keeping an eye on this
Megacorpse: I read that Puka is not very friendly all the time. When shaped as a horse it invites people for a ride which then turns out as a horrifying experience and it finally throws the person from its back.
Probably that's what happened on the image!? XD
In general, it's more efficient to have less materials, so I would consider putting everything other than the hair on one map. Separating out the eye onto its own texture can still be a good workflow though, because then you can reuse the same eye texture for multiple characters in a game.
This is my ulterior motive. The base character mesh was built with the idea of making a group of modular character assets. So really, I want to have smaller separated texture maps so you can mix and match wigs, faces, and outfits/accessories without loading excessively large textures with "wasted" information.
@Weisheng: Awesome work! I feel like his hair could use a little more detail to fit with the body though.
@weisheng So pretty *+* I love those kind of gif ! I agree with darkmag07 the bear could used some more awesomeness. nothing complicated just a small something. @Megacorpse puca are mischievous fairy. They aren't evil, but they aren't good to human either, they just love having fun.
damirboz: Glad to see you giving handpainted work a shot. It's a good first pass on the sword. But, what darkmag07 mentioned is true. The very obvious mirroring down the center of the blade is pretty distracting. Typically, you would unwrap one side of the blade uniquely, then mirror it across to the flip side (like you've done with the handle). If you really needed to save UV space or maximize resolution, mirroring it the way you have it now is fine, but you'll need to texture accordingly. So try to avoid obvious details and stick to subtle textures and value shifts only near mirror points.
@darkmag07 she need to learn how to put lipstick. JK there's a weird halo around her mouth. I think she would look better with purple eyeshadow. also you forgot to paint eyebrows
darkmag07 oh so that topology of hand worked well in rig !! its very optimised , thanks for share yeah i have some problems with the blender ,i dont know why there aren't good system for relax in uv editor like 3dmax(which i worked in before) (the ctrl+v doesnt make any sense)
and your character going very well
@gadorian thank you for explain that thing , i did the mirror thing and straiten the horizontal edges :
i tested it , it looks like there's no problem for now
@Maher: If you press "N" in the UV editor and open up the side panel, there under "Display" you can find a checkbox to show the stretching of your uvs. Dark Blue areas are unstretched while green, yellow, and red show a various levels of stretching. (This menu is also where you can enable the built-in checkerboard grids under "Image".)
Generally, I find that Blender's automatic mapping produces results with the least amount of stretching. The trick with the "Minimize Stretch" option, is that you can control the influence of the operation with the scroll wheel. But usually this makes things worse since, like I mentioned, Blender has already worked out the solution with the least stretch for a given island. (There may be a few verts here and there you could manually position to get less stretch.)
I hardly ever use it, but f you open up the UV menu on the bottom bar, there is a checkbox for "Sculpt". This enables a "painting" mode and if you press "T" to open up the Tools Menu there is an option for Grab, Relax, and Pinch brushes.
@Odow: Her texture is still super-duper WIP, but I have noted your suggestions for future updates.
This is probably what i'm going to do.
The redpinkish spot on the sheep ass is a spot of spray paint. In Ireland they let the sheeps go free, that's why everyone owner have his own color of paint, to know which sheep belongs to.
Finished rigging and adjusting the mesh for Pony. Will probably add some planes for the firey mane/tail effect at some point but I'm not going to worry about it now.
I agree, your horse mesh is looking great darkmag07, especially so with the rig! Did you just do a Google search for references? I've wanted to try to model/rig a horse for a while now.
I did a google search to see how others handled horse topology, but mostly I based it off of muscle anatomy. Most of the reference out there is pretty high poly so it isn't 100% apparent what a good "lowpoly" horse looks like. (My horse is just shy of 1k tris.) This one on 3D Ocean looks good, though I only just found it.
I decided to split between two texture-maps: one for skin and hair, and the other for the clothes.
Of course, by the time I was done with unwrapping I was half asleep, and thus the hands ended up taking too much space where that could've been devoted to the face, and I had to unwrap the hair a second time, because it was unusable when split up in strands. By stitching it together, I had an easier time in reworking the texture in an outside program. I might just rearrange things at the end and bake, so I can res down.
Anyway, base paint done with Blender's projection paint, then in Krita I smoothed out the strands and artefacts from Blender's brushes.
I will get back to the face/hair later, first going to visit the clothes. I just wanted to have something halfway decent up there. Otherwise, I'd annoy myself to death.
EDIT: sorry for the jpegs, I didn't notice I saved as these till now.
I don't think it do justice to the detail you're doing to do only hand painted, but I don't recommend going for geometry only.
First off, try to simplify the design, then put in geometry for the largest elements. For things like the leaves and smaller branches you can paint them in.
My personal instinct says to put in geometry for the nails that the strings rest on, because these contribute quite a bit to the silhouette, but maybe others have better ideas on that.
EDIT: In general, whether or not you want something to be part of the geometry, I always like to wonder whether I think it would benefit the silhouette of the object. Because only the geometry can affect the silhouette.
Hi everyone! I had an eye on this thread the whole week and i like the idea. There is so much cool stuff going on.
So i want to improve my skills on AO painting. I've started with this leprechaun blockout to get some idea what i'm looking for. Not sure with the face right now. But that's a task for tomorrow. What do you think?
This thread is great fun to follow. Here's my Guinness after a few hours of work:
I was going to do a stew as well but potatoes are hard to paint... so I think I'll do a beer tap and grate underneath it to better illustrate that's it's just been poured which is why it's all cloudy and not just dark (also more interesting to texture).
So it occured to me that the final product will look better if I model the hair and paint the textures after posing it, so here's the pose. Not satisfied by the topology at all, but it looks decent enough (I guess) and it's not the focus of this exercise anyway.
EDIT : may end up remaking it anyway. I lost a lot of good detail on the face.
Going to do a simple henge. Did the basic concept art, but I will probably do another pass and push it farther once I have the basic mesh and texture down.
Small update after another few hours of work. Trying to think of the best way to get more of a metal reflection across the top grate, which is a tiling texture...
Megacorpse -- my only crit of this pose currently is that the right front hoof is not turned under enough. If you angle the bottom of the hoof more toward the back I think it'll look more natural.
Replies
(It looks like you're using Blender so if you press "w" in the UV/Image Editor it will open up the alignment menu and align your selection accordingly. The auto align, "a", works pretty well most of the time.)
I wish I could take credit for inventing the topology on the hands, but I've referenced a bunch of ripped game models and this one's topology is almost 100% copied from Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles. It's actually already rigged and works pretty well. I'd rather keep the poly count low and deal with a little distortion. (It's not like this is an FPS and you'll be constantly looking at her hands!)
if i were you, i would delete a half of model (apart from the cap on top)
uv it, and straighten all lines
mirror back the missing parts
also, the straight uvs are much easier to paint on, and you will have no problem with aliasing if you were to scale down the texture for ingame usage
here's a quick paintover
edit:
@darkmag07 If youre not cheating, youre not trying hard enough.
Cleaned up the hair geo. Also have pretty much everything UV mapped, I just need to decide on how many textures I want to use so I can fit the puzzle pieces together. I'm thinking face + hair, body, and eyes will each get their own maps.
If you plan on using alpha transparency on the hair, I would recommend that you put the hair and the lashes on one map together, and put the face on the body map instead.
The reason for that is that the shader needed for alpha transparency will render all faces double-sided, which would be wasteful if it's applied to the character's face.
In general, it's more efficient to have less materials, so I would consider putting everything other than the hair on one map. Separating out the eye onto its own texture can still be a good workflow though, because then you can reuse the same eye texture for multiple characters in a game.
Probably that's what happened on the image!? XD
Looking forward to see your puka :-)
This is my ulterior motive. The base character mesh was built with the idea of making a group of modular character assets. So really, I want to have smaller separated texture maps so you can mix and match wigs, faces, and outfits/accessories without loading excessively large textures with "wasted" information.
@Weisheng: Awesome work! I feel like his hair could use a little more detail to fit with the body though.
@Megacorpse puca are mischievous fairy. They aren't evil, but they aren't good to human either, they just love having fun.
https://www.pinterest.com/odowl/polycount-handpaint-artjam-march-submission/
@weisheng - Great character! Thank you for the process gif.
WIP 1 - What I had in mind was a lucky irish sword, don't have much experience with handpainted textures, so I'm glad this thread exists
Blocked in colors. Next I'll start painting in 3D and tighten everything up and add details and junk.
@Megacorpse: Blendshapes are working pretty well.
damirboz: Glad to see you giving handpainted work a shot. It's a good first pass on the sword. But, what darkmag07 mentioned is true. The very obvious mirroring down the center of the blade is pretty distracting. Typically, you would unwrap one side of the blade uniquely, then mirror it across to the flip side (like you've done with the handle). If you really needed to save UV space or maximize resolution, mirroring it the way you have it now is fine, but you'll need to texture accordingly. So try to avoid obvious details and stick to subtle textures and value shifts only near mirror points.
What does good horse topology even look like? (Shoutout to Rory_M's Maximus Fanart for being an awesome side-view reference.)
I did a small mouse paintover
yeah i have some problems with the blender ,i dont know why there aren't good system for relax in uv editor like 3dmax(which i worked in before) (the ctrl+v doesnt make any sense)
and your character going very well
@gadorian thank you for explain that thing , i did the mirror thing and straiten the
horizontal edges :
i tested it , it looks like there's no problem for now
This is my final submission, far from perfect, but I'm moving on to practicing more handpainted stuff.
Generally, I find that Blender's automatic mapping produces results with the least amount of stretching. The trick with the "Minimize Stretch" option, is that you can control the influence of the operation with the scroll wheel. But usually this makes things worse since, like I mentioned, Blender has already worked out the solution with the least stretch for a given island. (There may be a few verts here and there you could manually position to get less stretch.)
I hardly ever use it, but f you open up the UV menu on the bottom bar, there is a checkbox for "Sculpt". This enables a "painting" mode and if you press "T" to open up the Tools Menu there is an option for Grab, Relax, and Pinch brushes.
@Odow: Her texture is still super-duper WIP, but I have noted your suggestions for future updates.
The redpinkish spot on the sheep ass is a spot of spray paint. In Ireland they let the sheeps go free, that's why everyone owner have his own color of paint, to know which sheep belongs to.
Finished rigging and adjusting the mesh for Pony. Will probably add some planes for the firey mane/tail effect at some point but I'm not going to worry about it now.
(Muybridge was a boss!)
Great work man!!
Made a laughable base paint for the Pony. But the face/leine details are beginning to form nicely.
@darkmag07 can't wait to see that horse painted
I tackled the always lovely task of unwrapping.
I decided to split between two texture-maps: one for skin and hair, and the other for the clothes.
Of course, by the time I was done with unwrapping I was half asleep, and thus the hands ended up taking too much space where that could've been devoted to the face, and I had to unwrap the hair a second time, because it was unusable when split up in strands. By stitching it together, I had an easier time in reworking the texture in an outside program. I might just rearrange things at the end and bake, so I can res down.
Anyway, base paint done with Blender's projection paint, then in Krita I smoothed out the strands and artefacts from Blender's brushes.
I will get back to the face/hair later, first going to visit the clothes. I just wanted to have something halfway decent up there. Otherwise, I'd annoy myself to death.
EDIT: sorry for the jpegs, I didn't notice I saved as these till now.
So this is the concept art.
This is my base mesh
The problem is this
Do I model this geometrically I.e. I can use cylinders to flesh out the details, or should I instead focus on trying to paint the details in.
I'm planning to do a picnic scene with a harp and maybe a tree with a small fairy door if I have enough time.
First off, try to simplify the design, then put in geometry for the largest elements. For things like the leaves and smaller branches you can paint them in.
My personal instinct says to put in geometry for the nails that the strings rest on, because these contribute quite a bit to the silhouette, but maybe others have better ideas on that.
EDIT: In general, whether or not you want something to be part of the geometry, I always like to wonder whether I think it would benefit the silhouette of the object. Because only the geometry can affect the silhouette.
So i want to improve my skills on AO painting. I've started with this leprechaun blockout to get some idea what i'm looking for. Not sure with the face right now. But that's a task for tomorrow. What do you think?
I was going to do a stew as well but potatoes are hard to paint... so I think I'll do a beer tap and grate underneath it to better illustrate that's it's just been poured which is why it's all cloudy and not just dark (also more interesting to texture).
EDIT : may end up remaking it anyway. I lost a lot of good detail on the face.
Bishop313 -- thanks!
Megacorpse -- my only crit of this pose currently is that the right front hoof is not turned under enough. If you angle the bottom of the hoof more toward the back I think it'll look more natural.