Hand Painted Staff -- Student Project

tinamamiller

This is my second attempt ever doing hand painted textures. I drew up the concept myself but I did take a lot of inspiration from World of Warcraft. This particular project took me about a week to complete and I used Maya 2016 and Photoshop to do it. I'm a student at Full Sail University and am just learning how to do this stuff, so I would very much appreciate any and all critiques!

Nomad - Nicolas Pirot

Looks pretty cool, nice job on the texturing.

A few more segments in the model wouldn't hurt though, specifically the top of the main curve.
Some of the finer details are fully modeled, like the chain and the rings, while some other areas are still pretty low poly.
It might help to take a step back from time to time to see how large it's actually going to be in screensize, and how important each detail is.

tinamamiller

Nomad - Nicolas Pirot said:

Looks pretty cool, nice job on the texturing.

A few more segments in the model wouldn't hurt though, specifically the top of the main curve.
Some of the finer details are fully modeled, like the chain and the rings, while some other areas are still pretty low poly.
It might help to take a step back from time to time to see how large it's actually going to be in screensize, and how important each detail is.

Thank you so much for your input! I need to practice more with low poly and figure out where more detail is necessary, for sure. I went back in and added a few more edge loops to try and round out some of the curves a little more. Does this seem a little better?

Zodd

First, great job on painting the texture, looks really cool.
The loop you've added between crystal and pendant on the end of the chain may use some rotation... like select the loop and rotate it 30-45 degrees so it looks like its ray being cast from the crystal.... don't know if i'm making sense with this sentence but i can make a rough paintover.
That may require some additional work on the texture but i think it would have better flow.

The detail-ness of the chain has been mentioned but seeing as every segment has its own texture (cause of the light from what i see) you can leave it but maybe use alpha map and billboard plane instead of geometry. If possible of course.

tinamamiller

Zodd said:

First, great job on painting the texture, looks really cool.
The loop you've added between crystal and pendant on the end of the chain may use some rotation... like select the loop and rotate it 30-45 degrees so it looks like its ray being cast from the crystal.... don't know if i'm making sense with this sentence but i can make a rough paintover.
That may require some additional work on the texture but i think it would have better flow.

The detail-ness of the chain has been mentioned but seeing as every segment has its own texture (cause of the light from what i see) you can leave it but maybe use alpha map and billboard plane instead of geometry. If possible of course.

I'm not quite sure what you mean about the rotation. I think I know what you mean but the paint-over would be very appreciated! Do you also have any recommendations for tutorials on alpha maps and billboard planes? I haven't learned how to use them yet in school so far but I think it would be a great tool to have to cut down on unnecessary polygons.

Zodd

No problem, here is an image illustrating the part about loop rotation

Simply add another channel in photoshop (alpha channel) with 100% white on the areas you want to show and 100% black with areas you want to not show
> save the image as *.png for instance since it supports alpha mapping > go to attribute editor in maya and add the image ( with alpha channel ) youve just made and it should add the "transparency" automatically.

 In the example above you would use planes (quads) instead of geometry of the chain and have those quads unwrapped like in the image marked "AlphaMap"  the alpha map will "clip" the "chain" to circles even tho they are quads, saving a lots of polygons (they dont need to be circles they can be any shape really).
Now about the billboard thingy i've mentioned...
This is a bit complicated and i may not be the best person to explain it but here is the quick rundown:
Billboard planes are always facing the camera and without them if you look at the simplified chain with alpha maps from a different angle it would look thin and... well not very chain like, and billboards are used to solve that problem since they are always facing the camera.
If you are using maya to present this piece ( which again looks great with all the lights painted in, i just love it ) here is a quick and dirty way to do it->
In maya, go to FX menu > nParticles > Particle tool > now place particles in the middle of each chain segment* > go to attribute editor > go to particle shape > render attributes > particle render type - change to sprite > back to attribute editor > material > change material to the one containing the chain segment textures ( these have alpha channel too ) and you should have chain that has ton of segments that are simple billboards and always face camera.
Here are some more images

However this may be overkill since it looks really pretty now and you may need to have separate textures since in your version there is light painted in each chain segment and here you would ( i think ) need to have each segment with separate material and texture and thats bad for the memory... i mean from what i know its much easier for engine to display polygons than to do the alpha check for each pixel.... So what im trying to say is i dont think you need to change anything except those loops to have better edge flow and silhouette. I really would like some input from someone more experienced in this than me

Oh and here is the image i used for example


Hope this rant helped, keep up the good work

tinamamiller

Zodd said:

Hope this rant helped, keep up the good work

That was very, very helpful! Thank you very much! I'll play around with it a little and see what I can come up with.