Temple in Wolrd of warcraft-ish style

Loqq

So I am making this temple for class. My teacher has not given me a polycount yet but that is neither here nor there. I want to keep it low poly but my teacher says since it is so big I need to add more. Also I need some advice on place to find good hand painted tutorials for stone walls, wood and metal. The little box in front of the door is a 6ft tall human and the lanterns and barrels/crates are to scale.

Johan Carlsson

Handpainted? Why not go through the process of turning some phototextures into the things you want. Photoshop can make miracles ;P check www.cgtextures.com out. It doesn't really have any handpainted textures but there's a hell of alot of free textures there. So just pick the stony ones, pick a base color and use some fancy layer modes in photoshop or just get a reference texture and start working

pior

Do you have a 2D concept?
If not it is a good time to stop modelling, paint over a render to see what kind of material quality/patterns/stone tiling you want and *then* start thinking about how to texture that. You are very likely to need some clever repeating textures all over the place, which requires accurate edge placement and on-the-fly UV editing. I'd recommand painting your 'library' of texture blocks on one or many growing texture sheets, and apply these elements as you go. If you end up with wasted space you can always rebake that. All in one there is more to it than 'adding more polygons' :P

And yeah handpainting would work better here considering your source of inspiration. As for painting techniques, use bold/sharp brushes as much as possible, deftly colored and with some subtle material overlays.

Good luck

buddikaman

My teacher(lead env artist of bioware) would shit a brick at the polycount on those ropes, wether your tacher gave you a polycount or not, if this is at all for a game, you need to cut those back. The texture work is what will really make or break this peice, but i think it could benefit from being more stylized and wonky, it looks much to perfect and uniform atm.

-Buddikaman-

Loqq

Cool thanks for the help guys. What do you mean by stylized and wonky I would really like to know! And like I said my teacher said that my walls and the slopping parts or the front are to low Poly any suggestions on that?

slosh

the rope def has too many polys. i say u can add some cuts to some of the larger faces that could use more smoothness...though IMO, it looks fine. the texture is really whats going to pop the structure....hand paint it!! photos just dont give u the awesome stylized look that handpainted textures can. and trust me, photoshopping photos is easy but making it look really good is very hard! anyone can tell u that a realistic texture is the easiest to nitpick cuz everyone knows exactly what it SHOULD look like. look at WOW..seams everywhere and no one complains cuz the handpainting is awesome. one more thing, if u want to add flare to the structure, pull some verts down here and there to give it a more chaotic feel...and add asymmetry...it looks to clean and symmetrical.

Loqq

Awesome thanks for the tips slosh I will reduce the ropes i was wondering about those any way. yea hand painted FTW! updates soon!