How to texture low poly models
polycounter
Hi people!
I'm created a spaceship for a game and I started texturing it but my texturing skills aren't my strongest so I would like some feedback from you!
I made it for a mobile game so its going to be very small on the screen. Any feedback is highly appreciated.
I'm created a spaceship for a game and I started texturing it but my texturing skills aren't my strongest so I would like some feedback from you!
I made it for a mobile game so its going to be very small on the screen. Any feedback is highly appreciated.
Replies
You can push this further with some more details, where would this ship rub against objects, add scratches, add wear etc.
2 - emulate that target.
PBR is not a option because this model is for a small mobile game, we only use the diffuse.
@ PIOR: Good feedback, thank you!
I think one thing that will help your texture is to bake some specular, AO maps directly into the diffuse. Also give it some wear and tear, this ship looks like it came straight out of the factory, don't be afraid to rough it up a little, give it some life and character
I would also add some gradation in the colors them selves
If you're working on a mobile game and using diffuse only, there are a couple of tricks you could use. Vertex colouring to tint certain parts of the surface, or abusing some channels of a bent normal map to give it a permanent faux-lighting. Even something as simple as using the AO map you have to give some kind of gradient overlay instead of the simple "fade to black" that it's currently doing by multiplying directly.
You could even adopt a self lit shader model to help colours pop better.
There's a couple of AO cheats that can help create some soft directional lighting, in addition to the bent normal map tip that Gir mentioned. If you add a ground plane or a bowl shape into your AO source scene you can can get a pretty nice base for further painting.
All of those red safety triangle you painted will not be more than a few pixel in size on mobile (if even that much). Most of your hatches and other details will be lost as well. Even some of your medium details are going to be too small once you get them on target device.
Make sure you are checking how things look from a distance. Make sure you can still read your textures when the model is the size it is going to be on your phone.
To help with this, I would honestly shrink your texture size. Your not going to use a 2048 map for mobile. You probably won't use much more than a 512. While one can argue that you can always down res later, when you down sample that much, you just end up painting a bunch details that get "optimized" away.
Pior and Gir and had some great advice as well. If you are unsure what to do, then Google Images is your best friend right now. Google the hell out of what ever type of game you are trying to make and see what others have done. Get inspired and use that to take this up a notch.
This has the advantage that you'll have a model set up for both diffuse-only lighting, with the option to use it in another engine later.
--
If you made a high poly version of your ship, you can use the bake for additional details (AO, Cavity, etc). Going off of what others have already said, if you only have a diffuse at your disposal it really comes down to trying to get the Diff to compensate for the other textures. Something I do when I have restrictions like this is to get a detail specular overlay from the normal map, convert the normal to a greyscale texture in which the edges are brighter than the remainder of the object. Using the green and red channels in the normal serve a similar purpose as that is essentially light data. Using these textures as an overlay you can play with the levels for tightness and further manually author your textures.
You already have a great base so you will do fine!