Crit my Textures: To hell and back!
polycounter lvl 9
Hey everyone, I'm doing some hand-painted textures that I need critted to hell and back. The style I'm going for is somethign along the lines of World of Warcraft/TF2. The first is a "stone wall" with a window. The stone has a plaster/mud like material over it that has broken away revealing a few of the stones that make up the wall. Here is where I am now, and I need a new pair of eyes looking at it. It will tile eventually, ignore the seams. Thanks everyone!
Right now I'm afraid to push the stones too much and make them look too 3D.
EDIT: This entire thread has been a WIP. Images posted here are where I am at right now from newest to oldest... the last two are where I started in the original post.
These are the old ones:
and a quick render:
Right now I'm afraid to push the stones too much and make them look too 3D.
EDIT: This entire thread has been a WIP. Images posted here are where I am at right now from newest to oldest... the last two are where I started in the original post.
These are the old ones:
and a quick render:
Replies
The texture itself is pretty good. One thing I'm worried about is the repetition of the elements. There are a lot of unique elements that tip the viewer off that it is tiled. The cracks in the top, the large crack along the sill of the window, etc. I would add more details scattered throughout the texture to hopefully break up the tile a bit better.
Another thing, for the style you are going for, I would try to "chunk" up your painting. The lines are a little too thin, and I think you could push your shading a little more too.
Hope it helps!
What I would do is when starting a texture like this, create masks for the basic shapes, like the bricks for window, other bricks that show through and so on. This way, you can select the shapes when painting to quickly make an edge stronger. Here's an extremely old tutor on this subject
http://chrisholden.net/tutor/masklayer.htm
Also, it could be simplicity of your brushes. Are you using any custom brushes? A lot of times I like to create new brushes when starting a project based on the materials I'll be painting.
I'll take out some of the more noticeable texture repetition (cracks) and start refining the shapes and defining them a bit more.
So far the entire painting is made with only custom brushes. Thanks for the feedback so far.
I won't comment on the repition of the textures, others took care of that. However, I would like to mention that if your just making one 1024 map then...well you'll obviously have repeating elements on the plane. That'll be an interesting thing to try to work on a "fix" for.
One thing I've noticed on a lot of the "WoW" style scenes and even in TF2 is contrast. Make sure that you have enough contrast in your texture that you can see smaller levels of detail better, or that make your window seem more 3D. Plaster and mud will have little more color variance than what you have now, perhaps slightly more brown and grey. Actually, you could probably just push what you have now to be more defined color wise. Once your further in the work, you might want to look at the saturation too and adjust accordingly (as it stands now, I'd increase it slightly).
Good luck on that btw! I'll probably be in town for part or most of the weekend too so I'll stop by and give you a good o'l fashioned pep talk! Assuming your at the WL.
The color variation also kind of throws me on a loop, it's very bruiselike. Are you looking at any real life photos for reference that you can share?
Edit: I just noticed my post needed to be changed to let you know, much like everyone else, I really like this. You're doing great! My suggestions are more "i wonder if this could be improved"
its a nice texture.
Thanks
A big thanks to Chris who suggested the masking idea... I can't believe I didn't think of that before.
My next texture (which I'll work on today after this one) is going to be wood planks... I know exciting right! Then I got another one too.
I am working off a concept, but I can't show it sorry
Here's a really quick paintover to show what i mean.
Also i kind of prefer the more painterly look of the first image you posted, it might be interesting to see a mix of the two? (of course im not sure what the style youre aiming for is exactly :P)
good luck man!
I think that's just an "old school" way that has kind of disappeared. When you think about it, you're trying to increase detail by throwing away pixels.
I work at full res all the time, sometimes I'll copy the canvas (ctrl+shift+c) paste it on top, run an unsharpen filter, and then use a layer mask to paint out stuff I don't want to look so sharp.
The tiling on the stone wall texture is still a bit of give and take... I want it to match the concept but still tile so I'll probably come back to that a bit later to fix it up some more. Also I'll probably tone down the contrast/saturation a tad and brighten it up just a bit too.
Beware of wood filling space of other wood, and by that I mean the perfect puzzle piece wood slats you've got going here. Your breaks don't need to be that exotic, and neither do the fill.
Ask Justin for a paintover, and totally make him do it.
I altered the spacing between a few boards but more importantly got rid of a lot of the jigsaw type puzzle piece boards and made them more even. I kept it a still a bit more cartoony and stylized though, so hopefully that is a happy medium. Still more work to do!
Maybe it can help. You mentioned something about trying to be like a mix between WoW and TF2, and I haven't really gotten a TF2 feeling from your texture quite yet. I know you're not done, so this is more of a suggestion of a direction you can take it.
Im not sure how I feel about the addition of the red- but the green doesn't feel right for wood, its a shame we can't see the reference :P Can you tell us if it's painted or moldy?
But the wood need some more love
Keep it up Vic, you're doing great!
GarageBay9: Thanks, my workflow is not the best by any means since I'm still learning, but this is what I do. I start by laying out the basic design in black and white for a mask. Then I add in pure values, in this case 5 different stone colors varying slightly.
Then I lay down massive amounts of messy color (not paying attention to any specific shape, but literaly just laying down color) using a lot of different values/hues for my color scheme. Then I'll mess with the opacity and eraser until I get the desired base stone color.
Then I go back in and start defining the shape of each stone. Working the edges with shadows and highlights.
Finaly I return my attention to the inner stone color and detailing.
Mazvix had a really nice tutorial in his thread a while back, if you do a search you'd be able to find it pretty easily.
Your main area to work on is rendering. Your values are all over the place and work against your original light-source. It looks like you over-did the bricks and lost the simple-yet-effective rendering of the earlier version. Keep your back-light darker than the local-value.
I would also suggest considering a less-descriptive light-source. Leave the edges to reveal shape and soft rendering to suggest form/planes. Try implementing your uber-highlights in the above image as local touches in corners, hard edges, etc., and not so globally.