Bathroom Texturing Art Test
polycounter lvl 11
Ok so here's what the story is.
I'm currently waiting to see if I got the on site interview with the company I did the ice cream truck for. (man I do hope i get that job) you can read about that, here
So before I got the phone interview, I actually recieved another art test from another company. This is a texturing art test. So here are my rules:
deleted due to obvious reasons!
And so I've started work on the wall/floor tiles. Here are some screens of the textures/render/in program shot:
I welcome, once again, your suggestions and crits.
If anything this is just keeping my mind off waiting for the hopeful phone call.
- Mike
I'm currently waiting to see if I got the on site interview with the company I did the ice cream truck for. (man I do hope i get that job) you can read about that, here
So before I got the phone interview, I actually recieved another art test from another company. This is a texturing art test. So here are my rules:
deleted due to obvious reasons!
And so I've started work on the wall/floor tiles. Here are some screens of the textures/render/in program shot:
I welcome, once again, your suggestions and crits.
If anything this is just keeping my mind off waiting for the hopeful phone call.
- Mike
Replies
Does the floor need to be that high poly? The wall tiles seem a little plain. Check out these links-
http://www.floridatile.com/ProductStuff/Tuscania.htm
http://www.trendir.com/archives/leather-wall-tile-edelman.jpg
Also, what studio is this for? How long do you have to complete it?
I'd push your normals out a lot more, get a nicer round edge on them, at the moment they look very much like they've been run through the NVidia filter, or crazybump without tweaking any settings.
It's also not helping you that all your tiles have a white highlight running down one side (both the green tiles and the concrete-ish ones) ... that will not look good if you put it in a scene where the light is coming from the opposite direction, since the highlight will be in the wrong place.
Something to bear in mind for normal-mapped texturing is that your diffuse and spec maps should not have any kind of directional lighting baked in or in the source, since that will just fight with the lighting information that the game engine is trying to create in real-time using the normalmaps.
Basically your diffuse maps should just have ambient occlusion in order to get the most believable and consistent results. No direct lighting of any sort.
As an example here are some quick tiles I did a while back, shown in the Quake 4 engine (not a very good screenshot, sorry):
http://www.greveson.co.uk/fumee/fumee_wip5.jpg
And the flats for those:
http://www.ldaustinart.com/paul//fumee/tiles01.jpg
The heightmap there could easily be "normalised" through the NVidia filter and combined on top of the original normal maps (which were baked from highpoly geometry, even shapes as simple as that can work really well if you have a clean and sharp base normalmap of the correct geometry).
Notice how the diffuse map appears completely "flat" in terms of lighting, just darker in the cracks.
That sort of stuff is what really separates the standard "copy/paste a photosource and call it done" monkeys from people who want to really make a good consistent set of textures.
So yeah. You're off to an alright start, but at the moment it's painfully obvious that most of those green tiles are cloned and copied, and the concretey texture is looking very flat and boring in general.
These sorts of things are quite easy to clean up fortunately, just give them all another pass and everything will look much better I reckon!
Keep it up!
edit: Oh yeah, don't know why you have all the subdivisions on the floor/walls, might as well just be a 2-triangle quad plane.
edit2: sorry if this sounds like a rant, it's late
I have till Thursday to finish it.
as far as the direction, they actually sent me a ton of concept and stuff that they want it to look like as far as colors and stuff.
MoP, wow that's some great tips actually. I'm going to rework the textures when I get in from work (oh damn you overnight work at Walmart) and fix these tiles up better. I actually like the idea of having the height map as the grunge and stuff on the floor instead of the actual pattern. That's smart. But then again, you are MoP.
Ok. I have an idea of what I need to get done here. Also, as far as stretching out the normals more. do you feel crazybump is a better program for pulling out normals than the nvidia plugin or even the xnormal plugin via photoshop?
MoP: just read your edits. I didn't model any of this, actually. it was sent to me by the company. Which is why I haven't really commented on the model itself. Do you think it'd be ok to optimize it? or is that a scenario of working with what you're given?
i think adding in a rubber baseboard would help. most bathrooms have those. i think adding in a drain in the floor might help. adding any detail type stuff, like a few busted tiles would help. adding any decal grime and graffiti or something would help too
And adding on, even if the environment is mildly clean (if that's what you're looking at)...there will always be somewhat of color variation on those surfaces so after breaking up the unity of those repeated tiles...make sure you get that in too or else it will still look like it needs coloring.
I have no idea how closely you are supposed to follow their artdirection,
what they told you, how they want it to look,
if you are supposed to make a convincing enviroment
or even what platform and engine this is for
(you could have left some very basic specs if you want specific crits and not give to much away)
but here are some general pointers:
Newer engine (UT3/CRYTEK/HL2 stuff)
-Enviroments are your friend.
Show that you understand how to get a shader to work together with your textures
and lightning in a ingame enviroment and you have a job.
To this end, get your work ingame in a engine similar to their tech and use cubemaps,
lights and whatever that isn't directly breaking their specifications to show that your textures
are doing their bit to make the bathroom look convincing.
Write something short and sweet about what you have used in the scene such as:
vertex lighting / dynamic lights
ao textures
cubemaps
ambient cubemaps (good thread)
shader instruction count/a list of what each shader does and their texture contents
amount of shaders
Unreal3 has a placeable actor (entity) for generating cubemaps.
HL2 has a placeable entity for generating cubemaps and switch which cubemap is being used
depending on where the player/spectator-camera is currently located.
-Older tech
No idea, but since you seem to be able to use normalmaps I doubt these are the target tech.
-If you are not allowed to do anything but diffuse+normal+spec
Be afraid, very afraid.
Listen to MoP, he's completly right about the tile design
(unless that was a requirement that they have that shape and depth).
Right now this is looking flat and boring (naturally since you just have started).
90% of all public bathrooms I have ever seen have been brightly lit,
full of shiny off-white tiles with a decorative border on the wall here and there.
My first priorities would be finding some decent refs, then
some matching tech, light the scene and bring on the cubemaps and reflections.
Then you can spend the remaining 85% of you time on the textures being fairly secure
that your setup will show your textures at their best.
Also make sure to include unlit shots and texture flats, sometimes it is amazing
what people think they can get away with when they send in samples of their work.
Good luck with the wait and I hope you get the job! (whichever of them
so here's an update on my floor texture so far, i haven't added much detail to it yet, or a spec map, but it's an updated normal map and a better diffuse i think, but the diffuse is still being worked on.
but Now i have to crash. When I wake up I plan on getting the floor and wall tile textures done before work again.
I have until Thursday to do this test,and I figure there will be 8 things for me to texture. so If I get these 2 done by tonight, then only 6 more to go.
the 3 things i'm worried about texturing, are the sink, the urnials, and the toilets. it seems really tough to paint porcelain.
I made a quick walk through. It took me about 20 minutes. Without actually making a tutorial it shouldn't take you more than 5 to set this up.
Big image here
If I was actually going to use this I'd probably go back and change some things but you should get the general idea
Good start on things BTW. Keep it up.
For instance if you put a light on the wall using the tiles I created, the specular will look irregular and more realistic due to the slightly tilted tiles. You would have to hand select the random tiles in photoshop (much more difficult) and then you would need to go into both red & green channels and push those colors to give the tiles different angles. Also if I need to change the with of my grout, angle of my edges etc. everyhing is intanced and very easy to work with.
yep basically i would have done the same thing okkun did. I'm sure a lot more environment guys would agree too. I know a lot of us have stuff like this that we have built to use at a later time. Bolts, nails, rivets, tiles, etc.
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I think we had a thread started once with this kind of stuff. Some of us ran into NDA issues and couldn't post a lot of what we have built over the years. Nothing wrong with making middle meshes just for textures. Also nothing wrong with getting your defuse & spec started in a 3d app either. I use a wide range procedural woods, metals, concrete, plastics to get those things going. Sure the materials take a while to set up the first time but they save me a bunch of time later on.
This is an example of the old metals I use. 100% procedural max materials. It bakes down into a nice defuse, and gives me a good spec map to start with. It's just noise, colors and speckle put into the various material slots in max.
Can Maya also do projection baking?
Man, monday, and nothing yet from the other company. the suspense is deadly!.