Blacksmith shop PBR

MasterBeard

Hello guys.

This is my first try in PBR.
Please tell me what you think and if you could give me some advice it would be great please help me to improve my work.

Thanks.

AtomicChikkin

I'd be tempted to recommend some foliage, like grass and weeds in controlled amounts to break up the form of the scene. Since the fire of the furnace is the center draw, having elements to shake up the color palette, though I recommend subtle shaking up, is a visual method of pushing the eye around the scene.

MasterBeard

AtomicChikkin. Thanks man. Thats a great idea

MasterBeard

Fixed many problems in texture

Bedrock

The scratches on the roof are a little over done, I doubt that place sees a lot of traffic. The wooden surfaces overall look pretty decent. The rings on the barrel look like they are floating a little and the wooden parts don't feel like they were made from separate parts. Maybe try to boost the normal map so that the vertical lines are stronger?

Your materials on the anvil/hammer could use a lot of work and I don't get the feeling that you are using references. Right now it looks like both are made out of chrome that had their paint scratched off, but they look incredibly rough in reality. Posting your texture maps is a good idea at this point so that people can see where to improve.

The forge. I'm not going to lie the design is straight up strange to me. Thin walls, but huge bricks and they get smaller towards the top. It's also really smooth on the sides so the bricks would need to be smoothened down as well and just... well most forges are fairly simple compared to what you have here. I just don't think it really works aesthetically. Is this your own design or do you have references?

The floor texture looks really low resolution compared to the rest of the scene. It's not bad but the ndo/crazybump feeling is strong. It also seems to have a really strong normal map, particularly visible inside the shadowed area in the top left.

MasterBeard

Hey Bedrock.
Thanks for your advices.
I really didnt noticed all that until you told me.
I am going to follow your tips.
Im attaching albedo and normal maps, also referance image i used for the forge.
I thought it was interesting shape. original one

Bedrock

Alrighty. So that forge does exist! My bad. With the bricks I would suggest two improvements. First, I'd stick to smaller bricks. On your texture it looks like there's three rows of relatively big bricks then smaller ones. Maybe cut off the three big rows and try and see how it looks with the smaller ones? Considering how small your forge is (it's much smaller than in your ref picture) I think smaller bricks would make it a lot more plausible.
I would also try to make the bricks thicker around the.. entrance? In your ref they actually look much thicker which makes the forge look a lot less flimsy.

Your wall and floor normal maps are incredibly noisy but lack any depth, which makes them look really flat and incredibly rough/porous on your 3d model. Do you use nDo2 to make these normal maps? This guy has some great brick walls on his site, notice how the brick's silhouette has a really strong normal whilst the surface definition is barely visible.
I don't know if you can hit that quality with something like nDo2 but you could sculpt it in zbrush like how that guy does it. Zbrush has good beginner tutorials so you could start there. Sculpting is a pretty essential skill to have so I'd suggest you try it at some point.

If you DO continue using nDo2 (which I'm still only assuming you are using at this point), there are some tutorials on brick walls specifically that teach you how to basically make a height map that will give you much cleaner results. I didn't look far but Dave Wilson's tutorial looks good, part 2 specifically.

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cKQwDu0EAA"]Here[/ame]


One last thing. Are you sure you are doing PBR? Because albedo and normal maps are not enough! You will need a roughness map as well, especially since you have everything on one texture. Marmoset has good stuff on this right here. Go to "PBR Texture Conversion" to get a quick good idea of what you are missing then you can read up on the rest.

MasterBeard

Bedrock. Thank you for your detailed feedback. I really appreciate it.
I do used nDo for this case. I am familiar with zbrush but the thing is I needed to do this quite quikly. I wish I had an opportunity to ask you thins things before I sent the result.
But anyways. I will start to fixing this issues guided by your feedback.
I an doing PBR and there are more maps in this scene. I just didnt included them in the post.
I have roughness, ao, and metalness for nails in bellows and anvil.
Also thanks for the video and reference link.

Vincent_DEROZIER

Could you post all your stratas do get a look into it ? it seems that you are not in the right PBR "workflow" or that ther is too many disturbing information like too much noise in your normals.

MasterBeard

Here are all my textures.
I am new to PBR and I may have some misunderstandings about it.
Although i have read many posts and few really nice book about it, like substance designer pbr enciclopedia for example. But maybe i didnt understud it well.

MasterBeard

Yeah and about that normal noise.. I baked 2 much small values in nDo. Im fixing it now

Vincent_DEROZIER

Ok, so what is the engine you are rendering your stuff ? Because you seems to use a metallic/roughness workflow but just be sure that your engine is using it and not the Specular/Glossiness Workflow.

For your normal, try at least to keep only big and medium voulmes, put your micro detail in your gloss map. To much noise in your normal can bring down all your efort.

For the Gloss, avoid the "duplicate the albedo, desaturate and level" way. It4s not working, and will not, the gloss need to ave his own information. To make you understand, every stain does'nt necessarly has voulme or a different albedo color. You have to to keep some information from the albedo for sure or from your normal but avoid to just copy past the albedo in the gloss or you will again create a lot of noise on your materials.

The best to understand it, take an object in your hand move it to see the lighting run on the surface and ask yourself in which stratas you should have put this information to have this result.

Keep it up.

MasterBeard

Vincent_DEROZIER. Thats a really nice advice man. I am copy/pate albedo to
roughness. I will do this approach your saing. Thanks man.

And for my preview I use Marmoset toolbag also UE4 sometimes.