Hand painted weapons practice
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Hi all
I've been spending the last few months learning to model with Maya and the last few weeks working from the very awesome hand painted texturing tutorial by Tyson Murphy. I really love stylized 3D art and I'm trying to learn to make some myself.
Now that I've completed the tutorial I want to practice what I've learned by working on a few other weapons. I found these concepts in the tutorial files:
So I've decided to work on these (with the exception of number 2 as I did this one for the tutorial) and I would really appreciate feedback if possible as I work on them. Note that I am very much a beginner so I may not 100% understand some things straight away.
To kick this off I've started by modeling the first sword today:
I'll get to work on UV mapping tomorrow so I can start to paint.
I'm also only working with Maya and Photoshop. I'm not quite ready to start learning other tools just yet.
I've been spending the last few months learning to model with Maya and the last few weeks working from the very awesome hand painted texturing tutorial by Tyson Murphy. I really love stylized 3D art and I'm trying to learn to make some myself.
Now that I've completed the tutorial I want to practice what I've learned by working on a few other weapons. I found these concepts in the tutorial files:
So I've decided to work on these (with the exception of number 2 as I did this one for the tutorial) and I would really appreciate feedback if possible as I work on them. Note that I am very much a beginner so I may not 100% understand some things straight away.
To kick this off I've started by modeling the first sword today:
I'll get to work on UV mapping tomorrow so I can start to paint.
I'm also only working with Maya and Photoshop. I'm not quite ready to start learning other tools just yet.
Replies
good luck with the hand painting project! I also started by making tons of weapons, and I must say it's a great way to learn how to make this kind of stuff, so good luck with your project!
regarding your model so far: try and keep in mind which part of the model will be most visible, and also how big an individual part of the dagger compared to the full weapon.. and based on those things try and distribute polygons to places where
a) it's on a key part of the model, and needs refined geometry for support
b) it's big and will be visible so it needs definition
So applying those point below to your model I believe the blade part could use more polygons for sure ( green on the picture ) because it's the biggest part of the model, and also the most important, and you can remove some loops from the handle protector ( red on the picture ) because it's smaller and it a bit more straight like on the concept
also you could make the handle protector's cross section a bit more interesting ( shown blue on the picture ) that way it will be easier to paint, and the end result will be better, and closer to the concept!
good luck!
Thank you so much for taking the time to explain this!
Good start, can't wait to see the textures, good luck
I began working on UVing this and ran into a few odd issues that I haven't been able to resolve yet. The handle has no distortion and yet in the UV editor it's showing up areas of fairly strong red/blue which would indicate that there should be distortion. On the guard there is far more distortion, but it's showing up almost completely white which is a bit strange and I'm not sure why this is.
Here are the UVs so far. I definitely need to fix the guard due to the distortion and it'll be incredibly hard to paint if I left it like this :P UVing is still a bit of a weak spot for me so this might take me a bit longer.
I've also started a bit of painting work but it's very rough. I'm trying to figure out my values at the moment, some parts are quite tricky. Here's how it's looking right now:
Some parts I haven't really done much work on at all and things are looking very muddy right now. Painting is the thing that I have the least amount of experience with so I think I'm going to be going back and forth on this a lot until I get the values right. I'm trying to keep the painting at the moment fairly quick as I don't want to spend a lot of time on something that ends up being incorrect.
For the lighting/shadow color what I mean is that you should define a warm color for your lit areas and a cool color for your shadows. Shading with pure black and white can leave your painting a bit lifeless light is almost never without some measure of color in it. Your brights should tend towards a warm color, most typically a shade of yellow which can imply sunlight, which the shadows can tend towards blue, green, purple etc whatever serves the color scheme of the piece better.
For the gradient, I'd suggest looking up baking out a gradient map in Maya for the quickest results, but your can also simply paint it by hand. Essentially you want a reasonably strong top down gradient to your piece to help imply light fall off and to focus the eye on areas of importance, most notably the blade. You'll want to keep it subtle, but noticeable. If you look at a lot of the weapon artists for WoW their weapons have this in the texture, identical materials are darker or lighter based on how low down the object you go.
Again it's looking much improved, I'm looking forward to your polished texture work!
I have actually been avoiding using pure white and black but I think the colours I ended up using were too de-saturated so I need to go back and fix that. I think I was afraid that I'd end up doing the opposite and making it too saturated :P
Been a bit slower with updates as I have been having trouble painting the guard and the gold edge around the greenish-blue area of the blade. I've had a few attempts at trying to establish the correct values and haven't been too happy with it so far.
I made a video about a year ago talking about painting weapons.. I believe you will find some useful information in there for handpainting!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YMu2jy7Oqw&t=95s
It will probably look like I've barely done anything but I've spent ages repainting the hand guard because I can't get it to look right but I shall post an update anyways.
So I've added a gradient map as an overlay but lowered the opacity on it quite a bit as it was making things look a bit too dark. I've worked a bit more on the blade as well and I've been trying to figure out the hand guard as I mentioned already. I did start to paint some straps onto the handle but I've run into a problem I need to fix before I go any further with that so it's pretty rough for now.
I'll refine the emblem towards the end as I work my way down the sword I think.
The straps are getting distorted at the moment so I think I'm going to need to go back and fix the handle somehow.
So I re-modeled the handle because the geometry was pretty bad, I think it's much better now. I've been able to make a lot more progress with painting the handle, so here's where I'm at so far.
Still not really finished yet as I need to fix a few things I'm not too happy with (feels like the bottom area of the sword is much better than the blade/hand guard) and add a bit of distress to the hand guard and blade. I wanted to post this up here before I did too much detailing for feedback first though.
I accidentally left my tablet at work one day so instead of painting I started to model part of the next weapon, but I won't carry on with this until I've finished the above.
Thanks for all the help so far
Looking better and better you are doing great! Above I made some little changes. I believe the main thing would be try and give form to each big geometry you have. For example if you make the handle darker as it turns in space ( where the cylinder form starts to face away from us ) then the viewer will understand that its a cylindrical form. If you emphasize it a little more even with some brighter tones on the part of the cylinder which faces us, then it will look even more clear! I also darkened down the handle's two end, which also serves the purpose of giving value to bigger geometry parts! I made the dark parts on the blade little bit brighter, so its not that hard on the eye, it has less contrast. But, since the metal parts needs contrast to read as metal, I added little ares where the value jumps up dramatically ( highlights) and that gives back that contrast, but it becomes more like metal! Its okay to move away from the concept sometimes the artist have only time to make a sketch. I believe you are heading in the right direction, keep it up!
And yeah, out of all the swords this one felt like there was less information in the concept art so I have kinda moved away from it a bit. The others I will probably try to be more accurate as they are more detailed in comparison.
model
Here's the texture
I think it's alright for a first attempt at making this sort of thing. I think for now I want to move onto the next sword then come back to this once I've learned a bit more about painting as I think most of my mistakes and such are mostly because I have pretty much no painting experience at all
Let me know what you guys think.
That said I threw together a quick paintover to help point out some things that could help you push the next piece further, bear in mind these are rough paintover and should be taken with a grain of salt, the principles however should be reasonably sound.
And I'll type up my scribbles since they could be hard to read.
Lighting:
-Brighter highlights towards the tip, if you're lighting this from top down you want to concentrate your contrast and brights towards the top, rather than letting it fall into shadow.
-The gold trim around the center area could be chunked up much further, the thicker and more beveled it is the easier it'll be to paint faked form/geo and if it had geo the chunkier it is the easier it'll be to sell the low poly look as intentional instead of as a technical limitation.
-Generally speaking I think your shadows are getting too dark, you've got to remember that your asset is also going to be affected by in-game lighting in engine so your darker shadows should be reserved for tight details that lack geo rather than on large form shadows.
-Even if you're painting with a true straight down light it's best to imply a little bit of angle depth wise so that things like the ring at the bottom still catch light on their top planes
Color Variation:
-Your planes and surfaces should have a measure of variance within themselves. You don't want your planes to be just one value/color throughout, it starts to feel kind of flat and boring. Having subtle splotches of similar colors (for example green, blue purple, or red, orange, yellow etc) helps break up those planes without destroying your form lighting
-Generally gold can get much saturation and contains some more variation either tending towards reds and oranges or sometimes patches of greens even based on the piece as a whole. @FirstKeeper has lots of great examples of gold work, especially in her Mist of Pandaria stuff. You can definitely push for higher contrast in the gold as well, to really sell that it's shiny metal. Shiny is achieved by getting dark patches next to very bright tight highlights
Bounced Light and Chunky Detail:
-Objects that are next to one another throw light onto each other. This effect is usually subtle in the real world, but Blizzard style really pumps it up. So the gold will throw yellow-orange on nearby patches of the blade, and the handle will throw blue-green onto the gold etc. This effect is more pronounced in the shadows where there's less light reflecting of the surface to begin with, and usually presents more on more reflective surfaces, the most obvious example being shiny chrone reflecting like a mirror.
-Blizzard style usually emphasizes chunky detail because it needs to be read from far away, on a small object with low texture resolution. Thin pixel wide scratches will disappear entirely once the texture mips down to a smaller size in game and even more when it drops at distance. On the other hand a thick wide scratch or dent will help display the form of the object and call attention to areas of detail from most distances.
-Usually you don't want your scratches going pure black either, the same property of bounced light means they'll often be decently lit by the highlighted plane on the bottom of the scratch, they should be darker than the surrounding surface for sure, but only by a bit.
-Bevel all the things! Another aspect of the blizzard style is that they really emphasize bevels in their assets. wide chunky bevels can still be cost effective polygon wise, but they really help their forms read from all angles. You've got that for the most part, though the gold border could do with more as said before. The best example on your piece is that bottom ring, a bevel on the outer edges will help ground the form and make it feel less "gamey" an it will help the viewer understand how the form turns with the asset.
I know this is a whole lot of text, I'm really bad about keeping things concise o.O but I hope all this helps and I'm looking forward to how the next sword is gonna turn out!
But yeah, for now I'll move onto the next one so I can get some more practice and so that I can incorporate your advice earlier on in the process.
Still need to work on the colours as I've mostly just been trying to get the values right. Also not too happy with that central part as it's very angular, but I have still got quite a lot of painting to do on that area anyway. Straps on the hilt have only been done super quickly just to make sure they display OK and I'll work on those a bit more once I've completed the bottom part.
model
Let me know what you guys think.
model
Flat texture:
The next sword looks quite challenging, but I'll give it my best shot lol
I've removed some of the smaller detailing and replaced that with just painting, but I'm having trouble deciding whether I should remove the geo for the panels on the blade (see below) and just paint those too. Currently the triangle count is at 1500 and my other swords I've been keeping below 1000... so I'm not sure what to do. Removing the panels won't take it down below that number anyways.
How do you guys decide whether something should be just painted on or whether you should model something out?
I'm aware that the fur part at the bottom just looks super weird right now so I'm working on replacing it with something else. Honestly, I wasn't sure how to approach this part. I've been looking through the WoW model viewer for some ideas and found something I would like to try and make. It's part of one of the female Tauren's hairstyle. I've brought it into Maya to have a look, it's this sort of thing:
I'm not 100% sure how to go about making something like this, and I noticed that the texture is somehow on both sides (on the underneath part of each hair)... so I'm going to spend some time this weekend trying to learn how to make something like this for the bottom of the sword.
What it looks like on the sword:
Much better. Just got to figure out how to make it myself :P