Desert Scene
First time posting here, was recommended by a friend who comes here alot. I am working on a full desert scene, low poly, normal mapped, and spec mapped, so that I can get used to more recent advances in tech and what not. This is my first attempt at normal mapping, and I used the photoshop plugins to make the normal. I am actually toying with the idea of making my models in mudbox, since I can make a better normal that way. Anyway, enough jibba jabba, heres what I have so far. Please critique and rip apart.
I have a ways to go when it comes to texturing by hand, so any help you guys can offer would be excellent.
I have a ways to go when it comes to texturing by hand, so any help you guys can offer would be excellent.
Replies
You're off to a good start but far from a usable asset. I would suggest that you add some smaller rocks, alpha grass, maybe even a small cactus around the base of the rock and cactus to help them blend into whatever scene you put them in.
Wires and texture sheets if you can post em would help me, help you with your unwrap job
I think your main problem has already been mentioned, but I just thought I'd share my method for this particular brand of rock. Conveniently enough, I'd modeled one awhile ago for project I worked on.
I'm assuming you pelted this, correct? Your seams look like they're set up right, so my only guess is you didn't do any relaxing. If you did, I'd give it another go, with these settings. These settings aren't concrete, but they're a pretty good balance for most relax functions. Also, it's guaranteed that you'll need to manually edit your meshes to some degree. If you were already aware of this tool, hope I didn't insult your intelligence
Here's a picture, hope it helps!
You guys were surprisingly helpful. Normally nobody steps up to help on other forums. Thanks a lot guys. I'll post stuff as I make it. Feel like I may be scrimping too much on the poly counts, what do you think?
In the texture on the left, you can see the smudgy areas in the encircled area. This is probably from using the clone stamp or pattern stamp brush too heavily. In the image on the right, you can see a soft edge where the two different rock patterns meet. If you want to improve that you need to match the colors and patterns up so it looks like the same rock. You could probably hide it with some cracks, or some more of the moss you have growing in the middle. Good job and good luck
1) You have natural seams in the rock you can exploit and hide your texture seams, make full use of them.
2) As Penzer mentioned don't paint a blurry defuse do what you can to better blend photo and hand painted. If its all hand painted I apologize, but some areas look MSPainted while others look top notch.
3) Just because its one object doesn't mean it needs to be one UV piece. I would break it up in 3 pieces and do 3 cylinder unwraps or pelt maps. Doing them in 3 pieces means there will be less stretching taking place on each piece. The less you have to POUND something flat the less stretching there will be.
The unwrap you have now is stretching the sides and inner pieces to pull them out and make them flat with the top. Thats fine if your working on a top down game. The angle presented to us suggests otherwise so I suggest you unwrap it something like this...
EDIT: Or maybe not. I guess I'll give texturing the other unwrap a try just for shits and giggles and see what floats up.
It really depends on the style you are going for. This latest piece is 10x more appealing to me because it seems to hit closer to a style mark, if that makes sense. That is to say, your first texture seems to use photo source with a soft clone brush. This came out blurry, and a bit incoherent. The way the UVs are set up, the texture is placed on the mesh incoherently, and does not look like a natural rock formation. Also, the mirroring in the texture is a turnoff, as you could just mirror the UVs and save texture space. If you use unique texture space for everything, make everything unique. That said, using photo source incorrectly can be a major turnoff, and really hurt your piece.
This last painty version has it's quirks, but it hits closer to the painty/cartoony style. It's consistent, and the UVs / Values on the texture fit the form better. The actual formation of the rocks is stylized in the mesh and this helps a lot. Though the rock formation on the texture is quite a bit off in some areas.
Another thing you want to keep in mind is how much lighting you want to bake into the texture. If you are doing a straight diffuse, with no normals, and you do not have dense geometry, then I would suggest picking 3 base colors, light, mid, and dark. Just slap those down boldly with your global light source in mind. Then you can work from there. I might suggest doing a render to texture, or pits'n'peaks just to see where you might want your values to lay, but I would advise against shortcuts while you are learning.
I would be more specific but it's late and I do not have my wacom on this machine to do a paint over to explain better, but i can do this later if you would like. Keep at it, the more mileage the better you will get!
Metabus, I dig the avatar
EDIT: My goal is to get this peice rendered to a point to where it no longer looks cartoony. I want to strive for as real as I can get it. So when I say I don't know where to go from here, I mean I don't know what the next step in texturing is to get this looking more real, and less painted.
Heres the normal
Now that I look at these I probably need to make the ridges a hell of a lot smaller...
EDIT: Ahh hell don't know why I posted this, it's so obviously stupid. I need to go back and rethink this thing. Sorry for spamming.
I would tone down the spec, and you might want to see what it looks like when you remove it? Most rocks, especially rocks in dry places are hardly ever that shinny, unless someone coats them in something?
You're headed in the right direction keep at it, big improvements with every post!
Is there anything glaringly wrong with it so far? It's still very much a wip, and I intend on blowing more walls out, I would just like to know if I am going to sun into problems with some of my divisions later.
On the building, a few things stand out. First thing that caught my attention was the way the bricks have fallen out below the window, yet the window is intact, does not seem to be a natural deterioration. Second thing on the window, look at it without the broken out pieces. It seems to be a bit high to me. If the "broken out" area below it is actually a semi broken doorway, you may want to tweak the proportions to make it read more like a doorway (taller or thinner, lower to the ground or with a front step). It's a good idea to know how many stories, and where the floors/ceilings will be, even if it's an exterior only model. That will be your guide as to where the windows and doors should be. Also have scale in mind to determine how big and how many windows/doors you want. Other than that, I would just clean up the mesh flow a little bit. You can run into lighting issues with long/thin tris. There is a balance between lower poly counts, and good mesh flow / size distribution.
Anyway, keep hacking away at it!
Look at your reference image, the shadows are reddish.
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Is there a way to change the color of the shadows on a normal map? I didn't bake in any color on the texture, it's just a tiled sandstone texture, with a normal and a spec
810 Polys
I'm going to take this model into mudbox and start planning my texture layout. Does anyone have any examples of good uv layouts for buildings? That would be a great help in figuring out how I am going to lay out this monster. I was thinking 1024 pixels for the skin, is that a good size?
Does it at least look decent? I don't really know how good it looks because the flat texture is kinda lame.
bump, normal, spec, and diffuse.
I wanted it to be a lot more shiney in the blue parts but don't really know how to do that via the spec map.
Im havent spent much time in mudbox but I had a play around with that idea and got some realy nice results.
@Emily: I'll get with you on MSN.