RPG House - Hand painted textures
Hi all, I need to beef up my portfolio quite a bit before sending it out to potential employers so I thought i'd start in the deep end and try some hand-painted textures and low poly modelling.
The original concept is from Blizzards WoW: Catacylsm concept art I found via google. I've tried to model and texture the prop around their style, but not 100% as i'd like to add my own style to the piece.
I still need to finish the wood trim (right half) and add some various features such as lanterns and the big cauldron up the top.
Crits appreciated!
The original concept is from Blizzards WoW: Catacylsm concept art I found via google. I've tried to model and texture the prop around their style, but not 100% as i'd like to add my own style to the piece.
I still need to finish the wood trim (right half) and add some various features such as lanterns and the big cauldron up the top.
Crits appreciated!
Replies
I think the textures seem a bit bright because of the lighting I used in maya to render it, I will try and render the next shot in marmoset or UDK to see the difference
thanks!
I think it would be worth it to bump up the roof texture to a 512 and add some more unique detail like missing shingles and varying up the size and coloring/lighting of the shingles to give it some contrast and variation. Also try painting in some subtle grime in the cracks to give the texture some more depth.
Your model also feels more stiff and CG, compared to the silhouette of the concept. I find sometimes it helps to throw a latice deformer on a model and squash and stretch it to ridiculous dimensions, and then dial it back. Pushing it to the extreme and pulling it back helps break the mental image that you have in your mind and really experiment to break up the cg look.
Oh, also adding AO would give a huge boost, I don't know what kind of engine you are shooting for, but a lot of engines can do baked lighting, even for handpainted textures. At my last job, we even went as far as to add additional uv sets and baked in ao for all the static objects at the end of the project.
i'll try the latice as well to see if I can get it a bit closer to the concept, looking at it now it seems a bit too tall and stiff as you mentioned.
edit: tried to get the house less stiff looking and more towards the exaggerated concept
thanks!
AO vertex bake is the correct solution for adding AO since the textures use unique UV's? time to research!
edit: arg so many smoothing errors
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3067/3048321636_347db66531.jpg
the long verticle grains can have some waves and flow in then from imperfections in the tree as it grows,
your wood grain goes all over and follows no real patern, makes it read more like curly hair.
the grain will also (not shown in this pic) taper in towards the top since the tree gets taller as it grows, the top most most likely will not have as many rings, knots are cause by the limbs and branches growing out from the tree, as the tree builds up rings do do the branches and limbs.
also your wood should not be seamless as far as construction of the piece, while wood can be bent and formed to a certain extent boards that size would be near impossible to shape and form, especialy that smooth curve followed instantly by that sharp angle,
i would make a straight piece at the top and bottom, with a formed curve conecting them.
you could say that the curves were cut out of a larger piece of wood, but if so the starting block would have to be huge,, and the wood grain would not follow the shape of the cut.
i hope at least a small amount of my gib made sense to you
Here are a few suggestions.
1) Door you can't get this done with tiles so some unique unwrap needs to be done. Probably float the door/step and pack them on their own sheet? You also need some kind of light fixture/water spout under 4.
2) The bricks are sharp, uneven in size and shape and are sporadic details.
You have round super defined bricks with very strong highlights.
You might want to experiment with using mostly a solid color with a few bricks here and there. or go with a pattern that when viewed at from a distance (squint) only a few bricks stand out.
Also the brick work around the windows is kind of weird, its like the mason cut the opening out of the bricks. Normally they would stack bricks in a way as to make an opening, that would require a unique unwrap, or possibly a few edges around the window and a unique spot on the texture. Or you could trim it and hide it, the ref does sort of indicate there is some trim there...
3) There's a pretty sizable overhang here that is missing from the model. The roof looks to be in the right spot and shape but the building inside isn't.
Also seeing a few roughed in uneven boards would work nice in helping to break up the repeating/tiling look. Just because your textures tile and are symmetrical doesn't mean your mesh needs to be.
4) The distance disparity here is pretty big. I think once you address the overhang issue this might correct itself.
5) It looks like this building is a beacon?
6) You could paint your tile bigger than it needs to be and paint a clean section, a dirty section and a damaged section then slide your UV's around to make use of the different areas.
The same idea can be applied to the brick work and probably the wood trim also.
7) If you did most of this with a uniquely unwrapped texture you could paint in a lot more specific lighting and details that would really help ground the building in the world. You can take what you have, create a 2nd UV channel, uniquely unwrap the building and transfer the diffuse from UV1 to UV2. Then replace UV1 with UV2. This would give you a good base to start painting your unique texture on, after addressing the above issues.
damn! thanks for the great comments
1) I was thinking of modelling a separate prop for the door so it could be placed in any enclave the level designer wants it to be, 2 doors 1 door etc! and yes, I am planning to add a hanging light and the cauldron up the top of the building, probably with some particle effects in UDK.
2) The bricks will be addressed in the next texture pass, I do agree they are too bold sharp and highlighted and I will try and get them more towards a sparodic placement with bigger sections of flat wall. I'm not sure how I will go about the windows, maybe a decal could work as a border...i'll see.
3) I've fixed the overhang in the latest model but the awning is too wide still, I'll try and reduce it. I'll also try and add some uneven boards etc.
6) I'm going to dirty up the textures near the end with some broken tiles and missing bricks again.
7) Not sure what you mean by this process?
Kind of like this.
The model on the left is unwrapped to UV1 to make good use of the tiles, when you look at the UV's they're a jumbled, stacked mess but it works really well with the tiles. It doesn't look all that bad, but it lacks unique weathering and is missing some Ambient occlusion.
The model on the right has a second UV channel (UV2) that is uniquely unwrapped, each UV shell has its own unique spot on the texture sheet. You bake/transfer maps from UV1 to UV2 and then paint in the details you can't put in the tiles. Then you get rid of UV1 and load UV2 into UV1.
I think I will focus on getting my tile textures looking awesome and if I have some time at the end (i've set myself a deadline) I will try this method to add some random elements to break up the tiling.
(WOOD TEXTURE HASN'T BEEN WORKED ON YET!)
Nice work!!! Awsome It has been improved soo much. You just have to adjust the texture around the windlines. Unless everyone else agress with what you have so far. and you are happy with it.
Amezing work sir.
Keep it up.
Hey Vig it would be wonderful if you could put together a small tutorial on this, it sounds really interesting!
The process goes a bit like this:
- Put a "UVW mapping add" modifier in the stack
- Now, create the second UVW unwrap modifier, and set that to map channel "2"
So basically, this allows you to have a lower res unwrap for uniqueness. This can be used internally in max, with the composite map, where you specify the map channel for each map, and then play around with blend modes. That or alpha blending.
However, I have not worked with UDK yet, so I cant tell you where to put what in there. Hope someone else here can give some insight into that part of the process.
To remove that seam maybe you could try running a ridge over it? Like in this image.
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=58411
I updated the mini-tut with pics and a slightly improved workflow.
@ bbob: Thanks, I definitely need to run some tests on this procedure, it looks very clean. I don't mind keeping both uv set on channels 1 and 2, their textures can be baked in a single one, provided I still got them separate as layers in photoshop.
@ Vig: That's good, thanks! Looking at the posting date, I wasn't a PC member yet
Don't worry, it's planned!
Hehe, I really should've read the whole thread before posting! :poly142:
Good to see more Adelaidians on here!
Would it be acceptable to post these shots in a final portfolio or present it somehow else?
-add in a door
-fix the wooden beam texture
-add in window stool, window skirt things
other things i strongly suggest:
-add decals or a blended texture with grime, dirt, moss, etc.
-add some missing roof tiles (halfway in the roof) and maybe something like birdpoo
-put the thing on a pedestal like a grassy hill or something (and then throw in a simple skybox)
-offset the stone texture a bit, it gets cut off at the window now and that doesn't look good
-cobwebs
-some imperfections in the wood
and looking at your wireframe, i think you can move around some vertices to
-make the top edges of the roof texture line up
-make some of the walls a bit slanted/warped/bent/askew but don't overdo it.
-get rid of the 4 way perfect symmetry, make one roof point higher, the other roof a bit bent, the third longer etc. same for the other elements (walls, beams)
And thanks for the crits, I will keep going
these look like brick size.
I like the textures on the door and the roof ^^,
good work overall (Y)