Texture Practice: Hand Painting. Thoughts Welcome!

rel

I've been "out of the game" for a while and want to share some work! If you have any thoughts or critiques please feel free to share. I'm starting off with a hand painted river rocks texture, so I wanted something shiny and water-worn. Halfway through my rocks looked like gleaming potatoes. So I've tried to clean them up a bit, get sharper and more solid with my painting, and bring in as many "not potato-y" elements as I can. 



Such shiny colorful potatoes! Below is a breakdown shot in case you want to see the spuds in all their glory. 



My own critique for myself is my textures are still too soft! I need to start them in a different way, with harder brushes maybe, that way I'm not battling a blurry base. 

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or critiques! I'm going to work on this a bit more tomorrow on my lunch break to get a little more detail in there, and then I think I'll move on to another practice to test starting from a sharper base. 

Larry

Good start my friend. Are you going for a realistic texture? Will these rocks be in the water? Eitherway but especially if they are in the water, you need to take the white shiningness a little bit down. Also your cavities(black parts) are too beveled to the inner part of the rocks, you may want that bevel for your normal/height map but not for your diffuse. Other than that, adding some subtle simple noise might make them even more realistic Even if water has polished them, they still have noise in their surface!
You might also want to lower down the reds on some rocks you have, as it is quite noticeable especially in your closeup. Warmer colours go to organic nature mostly, but yea you can use them anywhere as long as you understand what material is made from.In general what you used in your texture is good, it just needs more subtlety. Find the line where YOU cannot see them, and raise it a juuuuuuuuust a little bit more so that YOU can barely see them.(especially in the red colours)

All of the above are just my opinion, giving critique. It is perfectly fine the way it is right now, and i am saying this because when people tell me alot of things need to be adjusted, i get discouraged.So i'm making this clear to you, you have already made a very good texture.

rel

Mornin friend, and thank you very much for the thoughtful critique! I was aiming for stylized, Blizzard-y, and very much failed on that front. But I figure if I give it another go I can keep getting closer to that style!

Cavities, check! White shininess, would you recommend I color them a bit or just that they're a bit too shiny? Thank you very much for the color thoughts! I see where you're coming from for realism, zoomed out a bit that red definitely pops out more than I was aiming for. I like your note on subtlety, I'll keep an eye out for that in my next rendition. 

Eohek

This is a really lovely texture and a great start. Are you using any references? just doing a quick search of river rock and I see that the rocks overlap each other. your texture looks more like it would of been man-made like a wall. its just a thought because if you overlap them then you could add some really nice depth and would look more natural. other then that nothing else wrong with what you have done. Your colour blending is great. Just keep practising, hope to see more of your work soon      

rel

Thank you Eohek, I like your point about the overlapping rocks! It will definitely give a more natural vibe if they've been scattered over each other more than looking placed. Thank you for the thoughts!

rel

Worked on a new texture! Trying to aim away from the "hyper realism" and more into the hand painted feel. Overall I'm happy that I managed to keep the texture a lot sharper since my rocks were so fuzzy. I think it needs more life though!



And a breakdown shot because I think it's fun to show the progression  

rel

For more life and funliness, same texture base 3 ways! Still trying to aim for a hand painted feel. I feel like I'm getting closer, I need to learn to be a little looser and let there be more variety naturally. 

aryarie

I really love how you've created the 3 different textures  Seeing the progression is really helpful. I wish I was less newbie so I could give some proper critique :P

One thing that did come to mind was that if you were going for more of a Blizzard hand-painted feel like you mentioned is that I think you could maybe push the darks and highlights a bit more, for example like this texture:



The Blizzard style has a much chunkier feel to it which I think is what may be missing from your texture. 

I can definitely see an improvement from your last texture though.

rel

Chunkier! You are so right, that's an excellent description. I need to work towards not overpainting, I think I'm over blending and losing that looser, chunky feel. I'm happy that these are sharper than my last one but they are absolutely still too "soft" in appearance when compared to Blizzard textures. Thank you for the comment and the reference!