League of Legends fan art sword. I'm having trouble transitioning to PBR.
polycounter lvl 4
Hi,
I'm a student for Game Art and I will be graduating soon. I only recently started texturing for PBR and have been struggling to transition to it from last gen texturing. My last gen textures have never been amazing, but they're better than my PBR textures. So I have been studying up more on PBR the last couple weeks and I am still struggling to make good assets. Today I decided to remodel and texture an old model that I textured with last gen texturing. Here it is.
Each map is 4096
I'm not too happy with how it's going so far. I'm struggling adding details such as scratches and dirt.
Here is the old model. It was too noisy as are most of the textures I make which I have been trying to get better at.
Any critiques on the new one would be greatly appreciated.. Also does anybody know of any good tutorials for texturing with PBR that aren't tutorials of DDO or Substance Painter? I want to learn how to do everything manually first before I use programs to do it for me. And I really want to work hard to improve. Thanks.
I'm a student for Game Art and I will be graduating soon. I only recently started texturing for PBR and have been struggling to transition to it from last gen texturing. My last gen textures have never been amazing, but they're better than my PBR textures. So I have been studying up more on PBR the last couple weeks and I am still struggling to make good assets. Today I decided to remodel and texture an old model that I textured with last gen texturing. Here it is.
Each map is 4096
I'm not too happy with how it's going so far. I'm struggling adding details such as scratches and dirt.
Here is the old model. It was too noisy as are most of the textures I make which I have been trying to get better at.
Any critiques on the new one would be greatly appreciated.. Also does anybody know of any good tutorials for texturing with PBR that aren't tutorials of DDO or Substance Painter? I want to learn how to do everything manually first before I use programs to do it for me. And I really want to work hard to improve. Thanks.
Replies
You've chosen to do a piece that is almost entirely metallic. When you do metals, reflection is key; the reflection is mainly shaped by the roughness. You'r roughness here is just a uniform grime noise with some stretched pixel noise on top. What would create a surface like that?
(there is a common misconception that you can create proper brushed steel with that stretched pixel noise. While it does create a scratchy reflection, it does not look like actual brushed steel. For proper brushed steel, you need anisotropic reflections, which isn't supported well in most game engines)
For the actual model and normals: how is this thing built? How are these metal pieces attached? Was it hammered out by a blacksmith? Was it welded together? Was it cast in one piece? There are no clues to this in the model or the textures.
What is the brown strip in the middle? Wood? Leather? Plastic?
The gist of my critique is: A good piece tells a story, and this doesn't.
I would recommend focusing on copying actual historical swords before you go ahead and create a fantasy one. There are a lot of details and wear patterns that you learn from references that can be tricky to pick up when you work from your imagination only.
Alright I'll try creating a real sword first then. The problem I'm having is I don't know how to go about creating wear patterns and dust and surface variation. I've read up a lot on PBR and understand it fairly well. It's just applying that knowledge that I'm struggling with. Like using a crappy brush to create a grimy noise rather than creating realistic looking wear.
Like I don't know when to put detail into the roughness map and when to put it into the metallic map. Also I've been searching for some better brushes to use to help.
Also @Tectonic, yes I did see the marmoset PBR tutorial. But in it there were a lot of "I used DDO to achieve this effect." It did give me a better understanding of PBR but what I'm struggling with is applying that knowledge. What I would like is to see a video or even a stream where the artist shows themselves fully texturing an object and explaining how they're achieving the results. What type of brushes they use for the effects they get.
Thanks for the replies and help.