Panzer IV's

smurfbizkit

Hey,

A while back I made a post asking for critiques. The information was quite helpful in pointing me in the right direction. Since then I've done quite a lot of texturing for another project and have improved greatly.

FYI, this is for a WW2 RTS mod of mine. The units at typical ingame size will be roughly the size of the small render in the pictures.

Original:


Reworked:


UVMaps

I used to use inner/outer glows for the details, and have since switched to bevels and short drop shadows. I also started using better base textures, and adding in more color varience. I also stopped using the body and edge highlights in favor of something more realistc looking. In the end it seems a lot sharper, and ingame looks much much better.

I am happy with the improvement, however I am stuck. I have no idea of which direction I need to improve now. Obviously I know that I have quite a ways to go games such as Company of Heroes or mods like Point of Existance have far better (and more realistic) textures than anything I can do right now.

I was wondering if anyone could help point out what I need to change in order to get more professional quality textures? or any ways I could improve that specific texture?

KDR_11k

Could use maybe a bit of contrast between turret and base, currently it reads as one big blob.

aesir

Great improvement, but I also agree with kdr. From a distance, its very hard to seperate the different parts and tell what everything is.

smurfbizkit

Hmm, what would you suggest? Making the turret lighter? Shading the bottom of it or maybe the chasis under it?

Sean McBride

I personaly would suggest baking some of the lighting into the texture. Get a good overhead light setup like a skylight and use max's render to texture option. of course you'd have to erase some of the shadows like the muzzle because it rotates. But just having some of the shadows in there will help the entire piece pop.

Contrast baby!

If you need help with the render to texture tool just pm me but its pretty much the same as if you were rendering out a normal map... minus the cage stuff.

Vailias

Ahh smurfy! Good to see you still working on this. Much improved textures. The guys in this thread are right though. Perhaps bakeing in some shading to the textures would help nicely

ShadowM8

There is definitely a lot of improvement from the original.
I think overall your textures look a bit too washed out; I would like to see some sharper specs and shadows. The base texture could use more contrast to begin with. I also feel that some of your worn and dirt details feel a bit sporadic, and the excessive use of white chipped paint areas is a bit too distracting.
I'm assuming this will be rendered in 3d by the game engine hence I would be careful about putting in any strong key light, if you are going to bake the lights make it top lit with plenty of bounce light.
I would definitely cheat a bit and try to put more contrast between turret and body as mentioned above, perhaps just darken the contact areas of the hull and the turret and put a stronger highlight on the barrel itself.
And last but not least I would research the color scheme a bit more, right now it feels too saturated.

You should definitely check out this website, http://ofp.info/desertofp/ Marfy is the person who knows his craft, just looking at his work should give you plenty of ideas, he also has a few very simply tutorials available.

Best of luck to you.

smurfbizkit

About baking, it actually is baked. The renders are w/o any sort of shadows or lighting used. I typically bake a plain white texture, tweak it and use it as a new layer in photoshop. I usually use it only at partial opacity (70%) since any more than that and it seems to have really dark shadows ingame.

Thanks for the link Shadow, I'm gona have to try out some of the stuff there.

Sage

Well the texture seems a bit bright so you could always add an adjustment layer to tweek it. since this tanks scheme is the same color you could make the barrel a bit darker so it looks a littke different. You may also want to add a few layers to tint things slightly and increase the contrast. Add dirt. Later.

Alex