Am I doing this right?

Fogger

Started my first low poly hand painted weapon project loosely following Tyson Murphy's 3D Motive tutorial.
The concept is by Maxwell Davenport https://suburbbum.deviantart.com/art/Blades-01-360511203

In the tutorial Tyson stresses getting the proper values down first and I have very little experience painting in lighting.
For the most part I tried to follow the concept and I was wondering what you guys think of the base values so far before I started with color and detail.
Also how should I set my smoothing groups? Right now I have set them to auto but I think I read somewhere you should have pick smoothing groups according to UV islands. 

Brian "Panda" Choi

With handpainted assets, your smoothing groups tend to need to obey where you actually physically need hard or soft  normal breaks on the model.  You're only basing your smoothing groups on UV islands IF you decided to break your UV islands only along hard edges.  This matters more for realistic assets than it does for handpainted ones like these. 

You're taking the right approach.  Specularity on the blade could be much harsher to really accentuate the metal, but you said this was Max's concept.  Do you have the image on you to post?  Knowing his work, it sounds like it should just be a matter o straight up iimitating what he's literally painted, unless you're concerned about something else?

Fogger

Thanks for the advice on smoothing groups!
Yeah I have been following the concept for the most part but so far I have only made a diffuse texture. Wasn't sure if I should jump into spec/gloss with this first project.

Brian "Panda" Choi

With a style like this, you shouldn't need to jump into spec and gloss.

Fogger

Good to know. Update with color and detail.

Kingdan97

Looks very nice so far, although you're not quite hitting that WoW hand-painted style from Tyson's tutorial/your concept. Currently I would say you're texture styling is more similar to a mobile game(no shame in that at all) and if you were looking to hit the style in Tyson's video you would have to take a more painterly approach to your gradient shadings.

Your gradients are very smooth, and clean. It's certainly nice to look at but it doesn't make for a super interesting texture at the back end. Consider realistic texturing using Substance, where you can apply very clean colors to the different materials in your prop but to actually make it sing you need to add some well tuned wear, roughness changes and maybe even a dirt pass.

Notice how in Tyson's tutorial series he doesn't just do one kind of damage. Currently you're only really doing scratching, whereas he does passes of smaller damage details, little imperfections in the forging of the blade that catch subtle light. He also does a light pass with linear dodge to vary up his paint. This, in addition to bounce lights as well as his less clean painting technique allow him to hit a more personal visual style.

All that said though, I think you've done a nice job on this on the whole, just that if you want to hit the style in your concept you need to rework your process to adjust.

Fogger

I agree, texture and painterly looking gradients is something I find quite difficult and i'll need to work on. I think my biggest problem with painterly gradients is I have a hard time choosing colors, values and saturation on the fly like he does and I end up redoing everything multiple times getting frustrated with how it looks. Takes practice I suppose, I hope I get there one day.
Thank you for the critique!

Edit: Also thanks for the linear dodge tip, it certainly does give it an extra pop.

Sebeuroc

Looks like you've blocked out a good base, but I'd definitely keep pushing the painterly look. Let some brush strokes come through and push the color variation. Part of what makes hand painted textures look so rich and "painterly" is how the color will blend together. For example - a blueish grey metal will often have some brown tones worked into it. Or there may be some bounce color from nearby materials (like the gold of the hilt bouncing onto the blade). Just some things to think about.

Also, if you're struggling with finding colors on the fly, then make a rough palette as a guide. I do this often when painting textures, because repeated blending/sampling/blending/sampling will muddy the original colors. It's helpful to have at minimum, a highlight, mid-tone, and shadow value to reference.

I hope this helps, and keep up the good work!

Fogger

@Sebeuroc Yeah I hate when the colors turn muddy. I'll be sure to implement that into my workflow, thank you!