Low Poly Tavern assets. (critiques please)
polycounter lvl 2
Hi all! I'm practicing low poly asset creation and would like anyones opinion on these so far. I'm thinking of adding a blade stuck in the table, some liquid coming from the spout, maybe some liquid on the table and perhaps a fire place with a lit fire and pot of food in the background. Or...maybe just leaving it as is. Thanks all!
Replies
Hi! Nice project! I think currently the shading looks a bit off. Is the normal map sampled correctly and the direction of the y-channel correct?
The surfaces have a somewhat plasticy look. You could take some premade or scanned materials as a base, to then either stylise them or use them as reference for values.
Consider sharing the UV layout too, as it's an important part.
Generally, you could use some hard edges at steep angles (split UVs), so the normal map has to compensate less for the lowpolys shading.
Keep it up!
@Fabi_G Thanks a lot! I'm not really sure about the normal map. Substance plugin auto sets the maps up and did it with bump node which I felt wasn't working properly so I plugged the normal map file into an ainormalmap node and set it up like this:
And Uvs:
I did much of them as UDIMS so I could have larger islands and separate in substance painter by UV tiles workflow although I later found out it's actually unnecessary (the separate tiles for different materials) since you can poly select by uvs in substance. The checkerd uvs I scaled to make them much more visible to show they are the same density.
Oh, I see. I can't recall how I setup PBR Materials in Maya. Iirc, I used a Stingray Material for PBR preview, with manually assigned textures. Hopefully a Maya user can share their experience on the matter. Is the shading in Maya any different from the shading in Painter? One exemplary area where the shading looked off to me are the wood-ends of the barrel:
If the goal is to create game assets, I would do the final render in a game engine anyways. Personally, I like to import assets in engine early and continuously check the result during the process.
I have no experience using UDIMs and would probably pack the the UVs per asset in a way that maximizes UV space.
@Fabi_G Ok, this is really useful info. Would you mind answering a couple questions? For example, if you pack all the uvs together per asset and maximize UV space, how do you deal with very large and long objects, for example on a boat. (I made a pirate ship a long time ago that I struggled to get textures that weren't blured because the planks were so long and I didn't want to cut them up and introduce seams. Also, how do you continuously check the results if you have to constantly export the textures from substance and apply them to check them. That sounds tedious.
As for the wood ends, that was intentional, since wood ends often have a lighter tone from wear and such, or so I thought?
I have almost no experience with game engines and was just working on developing stylized art abilities with low poly props, but now that you mention it, it certainly makes sense to test in game engine since that's were that stuff would be used....I guess I'll have to learn all of this :) Thanks a ton!
how do you deal with very large and long objects
For a larger asset like a ship, I would consider using a tiling material to cover large areas, using vertex painted or second UV channel masks for break up, combined with parts textured by a trim atlas or individually textured. For smaller assets that extend in one direction, you could either split the UV shells or use a non square texture resolution (like 1:2). Of course the exact approach depends much on the Individual asset.
how do you continuously check the results if you have to constantly export the textures from substance and apply them to check them. That sounds tedious.
Once the assets are imported into engine, I would just hit reimport on the assets in question to update them. I'm sure most engines also allow for auto updating of changed assets. For fast exporting from the 3d program, I use a batch exporter to export with one click. Iirc, Maya has a game exporter that does the same. Export from Painter takes one shortcut + lmb. Overall, not that tedious in my experience and it prevents being surprised by the result at the very end.
Picking up a game engine like Unreal shouldn't be too hard, might be even fun. And yeah, knowing how to implement and present your assets is just practical. Keep it up 🚀