3D Watercolour car

poopstick

Hi guys, I've been experimenting with my texturing lately and have always been curious about traditionally painting my UV maps. I had a free day and decided to get down to it, and here it is!





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In order to achieve this I could have printed off the UVs but I ran had out of printer ink, so instead I tediously traced the UV map onto some cartridge paper. I painted the map using watercolours and finished it off with some pen work to define the details. Afterwards I scanned in my illustration and then moved it around in Photoshop to fit the map a bit better.



Before I attempted this process I always had the idea that maybe one day I could make a game consisting of just watercolour textures. After attempting this process I decided I was no longer fond of that idea, mainly due to the fact the average human life span is only around 80 years..

Regardless of how time consuming this process would be per asset I had a lot of fun and I'm really happy with the outcome. I plan to take my next watercolour project a little farther with a low poly watercolour tribute to the ghostbusters car

Btw if you'd like to see more varied work you can follow me on twitter https://twitter.com/vandam1989

Boozebeard

Cool idea, bit bland though. Some more colours would of been nice. I don't actually really see any reason why this should take too much longer than doing it digitally once you get used to the workflow? Especially if you get some ink for your printer :P

poopstick

It's mainly the watercolour process that takes a long time, with water colours you spend a lot of time doing washes, mixing colours, letting it dry etc. It's just not a good medium for fast production :P

Also printing may also be problem due to the fact that the UV lines will appear beneath the watercolours as they are very light. I'm probably going to print them out at a very low opacity and see how I get on.

As for the colours I get'cha that's what I plan to improve on with the Ghostbuster's vehicle.

BeardedMike

Maybe try painting them on a light table with the printed UV maps under your water color paper?

felipealves

Man, I really loved the results. Makes me want to see more work with this style

JordanN

Woooooooah, I'm jealous!!! I also had an idea of printing out UV maps and painting them by hand. But instead of watercolor, I used pencil crayons before.

All I can say is keep it up. If you want more ideas, look at wikipedia's page for watercolor. Maybe even make a complete scene or diorama with scanned in colors.

I'd definitely want to see someone else take this idea further.

root

This is a fantastic aesthetic and I'd love to see an entire environment (or an entire game) done like this.

I do a webcomic where I do all of my penciling digitally and then print the pencils in pale cyan directly onto watercolor paper, for finishing in watercolor, and I've been meaning to try something similar with 3d texturing, printing the UV's directly onto the watercolor paper.

When I was still working out the digital-to-watercolor workflow I experimented with a bunch of different approaches, including lightboxing the sketch onto heavier-weight watercolor paper, but for the sake of speed I settled on printing on 80# paper, which can be fed through a printer without much difficulty. I created a photoshop action that will take the grayscale sketch and drop out all the channels except for cyan, which it adjusts the levels on and then drops to 25%. Once it's been inked and painted over, the printed cyan pencils are no longer visible.

Anyway I took some photos last year of the inking and stretching process I use and they might be useful to you:

KristaW

Crazy. I had this exact same idea a year and half ago. I mean...exactly the same. Only I was going to do a character with a small diorama type environment. I was going to print out the uvs, watercolor the texture, and then scan it after I was done. I'm glad you tried it out. It has a nice look to it and it kind of reminds me of the style found in this short animation. I should dust off the scanner and consider this again.

poopstick

After what every has said I think I'll attempt turning this into a little scene as opposed to doing more cars, seems like the most natural way to progress and a decent challenge!

I was going to attempt a light box but I can't really see it working with watercolours, the only light box I have is a slanted one so the paints will drip, plus I fasten my paper to a board as done above in order to stop the cockling effect.

I'll most likely colour my UV's closet to the colour I'm painting and lower the opacity, for example if it's grass I'll use a green tint to the UV lines.

mon246

Looks interesting but my only criticism is that the model's edges are too hard and straight. The edges of a watercolour are usually indistinct and approximate. There isn't much harmony between the style of model and the texture. It looks like a paper model as opposed to a 3d representation of a watercolour. Hope that makes sense!

I'd suggest drawing the watercolour and then modelling to match the watercolour rather than drawing the watercolour to match the model's UVs

Tectonic

a process you could use that would create a similar effect would be to create flat colours of whatever watercolor paints you wanted, scan those into photoshop and use masks to show which color goes where on your UVs. Its more of a hybrid route, but it might make a faster workflow.

or you could do like vertex painting, where you create a grid of watercolor gradients and map your Uv's to the gradients.

but yeah, please keep making these, its beautiful.

spitty

cool! looking forward to seeing more. i messed around with this technique 10 or 15 years ago. i first drew some really simple linework in photoshop to establish were some of the main details would be, like eyes and mouth. i printed that out with the uvs and traced the details and uv borders really light in pencil. i inked it first and then painted it. here's a pic of the character i did http://www.ericspitler.com/images/3d/scurvy_shots.jpg

Odow

And there i though it was the only one with that idea in mind hahahaha, really nice ^-^

artbychien

awesome idea!! very inspirational, thanks for sharing

poopstick

Thanks!

Tectonic wrote: »

a process you could use that would create a similar effect would be to create flat colours of whatever watercolor paints you wanted, scan those into photoshop and use masks to show which color goes where on your UVs. Its more of a hybrid route, but it might make a faster workflow.

or you could do like vertex painting, where you create a grid of watercolor gradients and map your Uv's to the gradients.

but yeah, please keep making these, its beautiful.

Not sure how I'd do my pen work, but for the base colours this is good idea. I kind of have this weird feeling though that tells me if it's not entirely traditional it's cheating :P

spitty wrote: »

cool! looking forward to seeing more. i messed around with this technique 10 or 15 years ago. i first drew some really simple linework in photoshop to establish were some of the main details would be, like eyes and mouth. i printed that out with the uvs and traced the details and uv borders really light in pencil. i inked it first and then painted it. here's a pic of the character i did http://www.ericspitler.com/images/3d/scurvy_shots.jpg

Look awesome! Love his design, I'm going to try that method today of tracing the UV map onto some cartridge paper and see how I get on.

I'll update later tonight!

Gazu

Imagine a Game in Watercolor Style!
Beautiful !;)