Im gonna be an enviroment artist!!! but.....
polycounter lvl 18
Howdy guys
Hope your all well,anyway I have decided to go the route of an enviromental object artist,kinda like asset artist as you will. (u may now tell me whether this is or is not a good idea
)
Now onto my But....
How do i get started and what kinda things should I concenrate on??
Ive recently been trying to model half desent trees,but when it comes to creating the leaves on alpha maps I just can't make them convincing. Though i have managed at least a half desent plant with cactus like leaves.
Whats the best way of sharpeing photosourced textures?,oviously I don't use them straight from the can(or cam) and I am someone who is hell bent on making my own textures or editing them as I go but normally my photsourced textures become very blurry,while I look at other artists textures they are exstremily sharp and even better than any photo,just wandering what the secret is?...surily you don't all paint your wall textures and concorete textures do you? :P
and damn i gotta get back to my shelve stacking at the local superstore so this will do for now,hey ill even post up my cactus kinda leaved plant later cos im quite pleased with it but anyway gotta dash.
ill reply again later
thanks guys
john
Hope your all well,anyway I have decided to go the route of an enviromental object artist,kinda like asset artist as you will. (u may now tell me whether this is or is not a good idea
)Now onto my But....
How do i get started and what kinda things should I concenrate on??
Ive recently been trying to model half desent trees,but when it comes to creating the leaves on alpha maps I just can't make them convincing. Though i have managed at least a half desent plant with cactus like leaves.
Whats the best way of sharpeing photosourced textures?,oviously I don't use them straight from the can(or cam) and I am someone who is hell bent on making my own textures or editing them as I go but normally my photsourced textures become very blurry,while I look at other artists textures they are exstremily sharp and even better than any photo,just wandering what the secret is?...surily you don't all paint your wall textures and concorete textures do you? :P
and damn i gotta get back to my shelve stacking at the local superstore so this will do for now,hey ill even post up my cactus kinda leaved plant later cos im quite pleased with it but anyway gotta dash.
ill reply again later
thanks guys
john
Replies
The best way to start out imo, is to build a level in an editor, such as Hammer, or UnrealED. This way, everything is very linear, and snap-based. You also have a complete set of tools at your fingertips. You can also find out reletively quick, if your designs have good gameplay or not.
Depending on the engine as well, a lot of the level might be built in a 3d app such as 3dsmax/Maya. Unreal levels in particular, have large portions that are hand-crafted in a 3d app. At our studio, I have to build the entire level in max, as we do not use an editor.
As for photo-sourced textures, there are differant ways of working with them. You can use them simply as overlays (adding details to your underpainted texture), or using them straight up as themselves, and painting details on top of them. Personally, I use both of these methods. It's all for nothing though, if your source photo is bad. When you take pictures, there are some conditions you should try to meet, to get the best image from the camera.
- Shoot only during over-cast days. The clouds block the sun, and makes an overall diffuse lighting. You don't want sharp sun highlights on your photos.
- Use a tripod! Can't stress that enough. If you need crisp textures, this is a must.
- Never ever use the flash. If you're shooting in a dark locale, make sure you bring other means of lighting. Lamps, diffused flashlights, tin foil or mirrors (for reflected/bounced light), etc. You need to set them up to have an overall diffused light on the object you're going to photograph.
- If at all possible, try to take the image so that it's as close to tiling as possible. So if you're taking a pic of brick, try and get the grout to line up so that it's already close to being tilable. This will save time on tweaking it later.
As for building those trees, they are always a pain
Try bulding the base trunk and branches first, then make a texture to simulate it's smaller branches. After those are placed, use another texture with a leaf pattern, and extend that off of the smaller branch details. Build it out from there, and you'll get a pretty good looking tree.
As to what you should concentrate on, I would say texturing. With the current state of game engines, texturing is becoming more important than ever. When you model your low-poly environment objects, spend a lot of time optimizing the UV map. Then be sure to generate a really kick-ass skin for it. Take your time and paint the details on there. Most environmental objects need to be low-poly because of performance constraints. But an excellent skin painting job can make even the most basic model look like a million bucks.
I would suggest modeling completed environments propagated with individual assets you have modeled for portfolio pieces. I think a well modeled, well textured and well <u>lit</u> scene is more impressive than an individual object. Try and shoot for a variety of styles and genres to show you are flexible.
As for textures I use the same approach as Vassago. You mention that you have problems with blurriness, could that be in your UV layout as opposed to the texture itself? For objects like walls are you using a tileable texture and scaling your UVs to get a good balance between repeating patterns and resolution?
What is your 3d application of choice? If you are modeling in max learn how to use vertex painting if you don't already. You can use this to blend textures to break up repeating patterns / tiles. I'm sure other apps have something similiar but I'm not sure if it would be called the same.
1. Learn how to do tilable terrain textures. This will teach you lots about texturing, and you will need tons of tilable terrain textures in any well made level. Make any type of terrain that you can imagine. Concrete, Asphalt, springtime grass, winter grass, carpet, volcanic soil, etc. Make them tile flawlessly with no drastic color drift over the surface. Learn how to use photos, and also to hand paint textures. Ideally you should be able to paint well enough that your painted textures can be used alongside photo textures, and no one would notice a difference in the quality. You should also know how to adjust colors so that different textures will blend together, or fit the same palette well.
Photoshop tools to use: Offset Filter, Pattern fills, levels and curves adjustments, Selective Color, Alpha Channels, masking, Unsharp Mask (the best for manual sharpening).
2. Prop modeling, UV mapping, texturing. Do both organic and inorganic models. Inorganic are easier, so start there. Learn your polygon tools and become intimately familiar with your UV editor. Apply painting and texturing skill that you learned while doing tiling textures to these 3d model texture sheets.
3. Lighting. Learn your in game lighting system. Learn how to set up lights in your 3d app to render out light maps. Advanced lighting features such as global illumination, radiosity, final gathering, etc. will make your lighting look much better, so learn them. Focus on setting moods with your lighting.
thanks for the help guys,just got back from work,my last action of the night diving for cover while my mate dealt with a very i-rate customer..hehe the joys of superstore life.
anyway,you guys have confirmed what I suspected,basically my charcter art is my weakest area by quite away,ive been told by several professional people that I can make it,but to make it I really need to concentrate on one section,evolve in that section, get a job and then exspand my horizons as i feel (like charcters) and I am aware that companies are after more enviromental artists and thats why i have chosen to take this route
Now about taking textures,the tripod might be why my photos are maybe slightly blury not much but just an anoying amount,Ill look into that one.
Astro my main 3d AP is studiomax...the only exsperience I have with the vertex paint feature is using it as a method of texture baking (think sir Bobo
Tiling textures is soemthing I need to work on,tahts one of my not so great points and I guess the first thing to work on is this....open PS- filter-other-offset-pick sensible pixel space between tiles - use the clone tool to hide theedge lines as well as possible....this right? yeah ?...
Its mainly things like inconsistencies in walls,if I have a pic of a wall and an area at say the top edge has green moss stains on it and then i use taht as a texture that same moss stain is there at consistent intervals along the texture...u saying I can use vertex paint to help avoide this?
also my site is http://www.hedgeart.com , im just in the middle of an update and abit of a reform so some links maybe down or broken but it give syou some more insight into my current exsperience.
Im now yapping,I think the bottom line is....I know the theory behind enviroment art,its just im not so sure about the methods on how to put this knowledge and theory to practicale use and get into the mind of an enviromental artist.
Thanks for the hasty replies,much appreciated
john
The wall texture you described there can be fixed 2 ways.
- Paint over the areas in the texture that are WAY too repetetive, and belnd them together to make them less noticable.
- Or use decal maps. Not all engines support them, but they are support in all hardware. Decal maps are things like graffiti, rips/tears, stains or holes. Things like this can be overlayed onto existing textures. If your engine doesn't support a second UV channel (there's no reason why it shouldn't), you can always stick a quad about an inch away from the wall, with the decal texture on it.
And learn about vertex color baking, as well as hand painting. You'll use both. Usually you set up some omni lights to get the general color scheme and mood down, bake that into the vertex colors, and then go in and hand paint certain areas to increase the dramatic feel or add more realistic lighting effects like bounced light and darker corners of a room.
Just don't neglect the lighting. It's easy to get caught up in modeling and texturing, but the lighting pass can make or break a level visually. It's also used as a gameplay element to give the player a sense of where to go next. Good lighting can lead a player around a level and showcase the important areas without being obvious about it.
A couple tiling tutorials I like.
http://www.twisted-strand.com/ut_tutorials/text_tut/index.html
http://www.planetquake.com/polycount/cottages/cokane/textures_tutorial.html
I use Half Wrap all the time, much quicker than Offset. I have it bound to an Action, so it's a one button-press job. Also the Top/Bottom and Left/Right ones (in the zip).
http://www.btinternet.com/~cateran/simple/
Its mainly things like inconsistencies in walls,if I have a pic of a wall and an area at say the top edge has green moss stains on it and then i use taht as a texture that same moss stain is there at consistent intervals along the texture...u saying I can use vertex paint to help avoide this?
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That is EXACTLY what I am saying. You can use a "Mix" map with a wall texture and a moss texture and then use vertex painting to blend the two. I'm not sure how many game engines support vertex texture blending other than Unreal but if all you are doing is max renders than no worry (the blend will only show up when you render, AFAIK). If you want to do it for an unreal object there's a tutorial for it here.
(I am also an aspiring game artist, and I have thought about going the environment route, but it also seems like there's much more information out there about characters than envs.)
A lot of studios (ours included), do a blend of shadow maps and vertex lighting. Unfortuneatly, the PS2 has crap support for alpha blending, so you can't do a lot of things with it. Colored light/darkmaps in particular, are horribly expensive on PS2. They require one render pass per-channel. So for a RGB texture, that's three rendering passes for your scene.
I'm sure that after the next gen of consoles comes out, things will be much easier to deal with. PS3 will have a GeForce 6800 equivelant graphics chip, and I'm sure Xbox next will get a similar performing chip from ATI. When that happens, we might finally be able to let go of vertex lighting (props aside), and use nothing but lightmaps.
First thing is first,get my damn site back-up,stupid thing decided not to upload...
Secondly I have afew wall pics taken by myselfof which some are of pretty good quality,ill see if I can make smooth tiling and get rid of unwanted light from them,that shall be my first baby steps into the world of enviromental art.
thanks for the advise and support guys,im gonna go and finish working my website now.
John
Unfortuneatly, the PS2 has crap support for alpha blending, so you can't do a lot of things with it. Colored light/darkmaps in particular, are horribly expensive on PS2. They require one render pass per-channel. So for a RGB texture, that's three rendering passes for your scene.
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That is, quick frankly, bunk. The PS2 can do a coloured lightmap blend (modulate)in a single pass, same as the other current-gen consoles.
http://www.hedgeart.com
I have also been practicing my making tilable texture skills today,heres an example of some I have done,applied to a plane in Max and tiled twice in both direction....
http://www.hedgeart.com/renders/WIPS/tiled_textures.jpg
Im gonna try making some inperfections now and maybe some grafetti and see how it goes...as well as tiling the wall textures that I use.
Thanks for the support and advise guys.
John
P.S btw Ryno your link you posted doesn't work
Edit:- guys how exacly do you do brick textures as the above techneque doesn't seem to work as well a sit did on the wood and stones...I guess this is becuase generally the pattern of brick is much more uniformed..is it best to paint bricks first then overlay them or what?
thanks
john
That bigger line in the middle of the texture on the right will stand out when it's tiled more.
The biggest problem with the brick texture is that you have the brightest and darkest bricks right next to each other. So that area stands out from the rest and creates a noticable pattern when it's repeated. What you want to do is keep eveything as middle toned as possible, without making it too boring. Any areas that are much darker or lighter than the majority should be kept away from each other and evenly distributed around the texture. The closer they get to each other, then more likeable a recognizable pattern will emerge.
Also, let's say you have two darker areas in the texture. Put one darker area in the upper right quadrant, and the other one in the lower left. A diagonal pattern isn't as obvious as a vertical or horizontal pattern.
Hope that helps and makes sense.
Thanks for the advise,I used hi-pass and pushed that abit more it got a tad to grey for my liking despite the hi-pass being applied to a duplicated layer then set on luminous blending so i messed with curves,levels and color replace to get the color back. I also forgot to reset the offset filter so putting like -256 -256 once my adjustments had been done....school boy error
Ok,so tiling I see the cocnept on,more practice needed but that all it is really practice and ill get better
My next thing is to make textures with inconsistencies and see if I can make it look relistic yet within game restrictions.
However first i have a newbie question that doesn't just apply to what im doing but is soemthing ive never been to sure about....
If I have an object that requires an alpha map,say some grass or tree leaves,I have the diffuse color map and the alpha map applied,but im then not sure how to apply it to studiomax,the method ive been using till now is make a diffuse map and alpha map as 2 seperate files and simply stick the black and white into the opacity slot in max,oviously this is not the right method so what is the right method?
Meanwhile im going to try and exsperiment some with astrozombie's mixing stuff and vertex paint methods.
Thanks for the replies guys,great help you all are,why i love polycount
john
1. The artists are not testing their works repeat pattern over a large area. This can be done easily.
Drag a mask around your tiling texture, select DEFINE PATTERN from the IMAGE pulldown menu.
Create a new image thats huge ( 10,000 by 10,000).
Select the flood fill tool, set its options to Pattern and flood fill in the new image.
In this way, it is clear which parts of your perfect tiling image repeat too obviously.
Its an easy little step that most forget to do.
2.NEVER use a photo raw like these guys are doing, its the mark of an amateur imo. The best texture artists that are using some elements of compositing in their workflow tend to combine a number of different photos to signficantly alter their original source material.
This is your way of putting your own stamp of reinvention upon your work and not looking like all the other intermediates whose source files you can recognize a mile away.
Working purely from the source material gradually makes all gameart look the same, anything that looks the same becomes boring and this shows up clear in your portfolio when someone is considering you for a job.
I have the diffuse color map and the alpha map applied,but im then not sure how to apply it to studiomax
[/ QUOTE ]Put the bitmap in the Diffuse Color channel, then in its Bitmap Parameters rollout set Alpha Source to None. Copy the map into the Opacity channel, set Alpha Source to Image Alpha, and set Mono Channel Output to Alpha.
Another helpful tool for tiling...
http://3t.lastchancemedia.com/
This exe auto-reloads a texture every time you save, showing you a constant display of the tiling. I've set up an Action in Photoshop that saves my image as a PNG file (only format it supports apparently) into the 3T directory. I like how it lets me rotate the tile to see it foreshortened, really helps pick out the anomalies. I don't like the slow zoom though, but that's just a nit-pick. They didn't mention in the Help that if you make the window larger, it tiles the map more often. Very cool little app, I prefer this over pattern-filling. It doesn't let you tile as much as a pattern-fill can, but then again you get to see it filtered and foreshortened.
Thanks for the link eric ill have to give it ago.
as for the warning Rorshach,yeah i noticed those tuts used striaght photos and so did I,however right now im simply trying to get the hang of the tiling process as its like most of my knowledge I know the theory of it
and why we doit,but not 100% sure how to put it into practice myself,namily cos Im ursally doing objects when compared to scenes/walls/floors etc etc,just abit of practise on my part
Normally im hell bent on making stuff look and feel my own so no worries there
cheers
John
Edit:- Eric just tried your advise about the alpha's....mine seems to be greyed out on both "alpha souce" and the "mono channel output" setting.
im using a .psd file simply cos im editing it an exsperiementing as i go,ive just deleted the alpha masks and put a pure alpha layer in instead and save dagain but they are still greyed out.
Ive also tried with a .jpg file and still its greyed out...any ideas?
Thanks
If you open your .jpg in Photoshop and switch to the Channels tab you'll noticed there's no fourth alpha channel, just the three channels for RGB. That's why it's greyed out in Max, it's not finding an alpha channel to work with.
So make sure there's a black and white alpha channel in Photoshop, save as a 32 bit targa file, and then use that file in Max the way Eric described and it should work.
john
not done much in the way of work today just been asking round about stuff making sure I do acturally know the basics and have acturally learnt some stuff.
But I have one curious question leaved...here goes:-
I have my section of wall,it just so happens to be a long corridore type wall but has only has 1 polygon.....now I have my wonderful tilable brick which make sup 75% of the wall....however the middle section my boss wants me to make another colour...say a black section of wall....how would I apply 2 different wall textures to one polygon face?..or would I just use a textured plane to represent this section?.
Thanks for the advsie though guys,been really great stuff,might start my first enviroemntal model tomorrow
john
I usually find it's best to model using square polys. So for example, you start with a poly that's 10'x10', and you want a hallway that's 50 feet long, you just put five of your 10'x10' polys together. That way it's easier to swap out textures so it doesn't look so tiled, and it works better for vertex lighting to have more verts going down the hallway.
was just curious.
thanks anyway
john
I have another simple question that im in a mixed minds about.
I am modelling a wooden shack,so its kinda important to make sure the woodtextures go round together properly(with no seam).
basically should I go about this by making 1 basic wood texture and get the alignment right on that....then use it as the base for all my other textures on the building and eventurally have 4 seperate texture maps for each side of my building or should I map it all together as you do on any normal model?
Thanks
John
Normally, you would always create seperate, square textures. Game engines can't work with large, rectangular textures as well. So it's better to cut it up.
Also, when creating for example, four wood textures that are meant to go together, make sure they all connect seamlessly on the sides. By that I mean they all connect to each other no matter in what order you place them together. That way you can use them over and over, in different configurations for more variety, but they'll still look seamless in the game.
Hope that helps.
However im having some real technecal issues now,namily with these alpha channels.Im not sure wether its my max set-up or soemthing im doing wrong in there process.
basically I started with a white image and painted on grass (as I want some grass thrown in Rome-total war style)...I then go Channals-new channel-then black for the background and white for the grass on the alpha...I then go file-save-(filename).tga -32bit....I go into max load up my image and do as Eric said above.
However it doesn't work,the plane in the max viewport stays solide....ive now tried so many things im acturally confused.
I have tried started out with a transprent background it worked to a degree,but from certain angles you could see the edge of the planes in the viewport,dispite my alpha seemingly being prefectly clean and solide...
do i acturally have to have the alpha active when I save it to a .tga file? (so the background around the grass becomes a light shade of red)....
Also when I reopen the .tga file the alpha channel has gone.
is this suppose to happen? i remember when i used to use .tga's a channel was automatically created when its saved (normally a default solide black channel.) this doesn't seem to be happening for some reason.
And heres another strange alpha map problem not related to grass this time,but the moss I intend to put on the roof of my shack, i follow the above guidence and this time...the areas I say should be transprent(the black areas) become solide...the white araes become transprent....so logically i try changing the black and white round and now nothing happens atool,I just have my solide plane with the diffuse map applied.
Sorry if im unclear,I can post some example pics if need be,but it just seems either me or the computer are somehow getting confused or I have some messed up settings somewhere.
Thanks for your time guys.
john
Odd about the TGA file though. You're sure you are saving it out as a 32-bit file? I've made the mistake before of rapidly hitting enter to skip the screens, and often saving it out as a 24bit tga