Hand painted church , need help

Oleg

Hi all ,

Right now I am working on a church model and I really need help with handpaihted textures.
The textures don't look right at this moment.
And I was wondering if you guys could give a hint or two.

This Is what I have right now.



And this are the textures.





Th

3DVlad

I think the textures look too simple now... I think if you just add some complexity to it it would look much better... Try playing around with noise filter, difference clouds, Gaussian blur and different layer modes... Im sorry I can't be more specific, I havent done much hand painted textures but from some tutorials I have read that seems to be what they are using when doing everything hand painted...

madmuffin

I've been doing a lot of hand painted work lately and my advice is to take a single piece of your work and push it as far as you can instead of polishing the whole thing as a whole.

Take just one of those bricks on your tiling map and focus on making it look really good. Even though it's hand painted, real life references can be really useful, as well as taking a look at other hand painted stuff like Torchlight's textures, Wow's, etc.

And lastly, there are a lot of good tutorials out there, the nice thing about hand painting is that you can benefit from pretty much any digital painting tutorial.

You've got a good start, try adding more variation and contrast to it, and play with light and shadow as these can really make your texture pop. Right now it feels pretty flat, I'm not getting the depth from it.

MainManiac

I think you should add a little more expression to it.

elementrix

hey, I'm in the same boat so maybe I could help a little.

The textures look like your just painting some dark areas and highlights on a one color background with slight noise applied (the bricks). Like frell said, just add some expression to it, do some loose brushstrokes and have fun while your doing it. Are you using a tablet? If not you should consider buying one.

I made this little paintover of one brick, it's not perfect just the way I work atm, just take that background color, pick some darker and lighter colors and add some life to the middle of the bricks.



your style isn't wrong though, it's just another style. The door feels like it could be in a children's book. The bricks don't really match though. It's your choice to go in a certain direction, could be this, but it would be easier - if it's your first time - to take a game as example and try to mimic that style by looking at screenshots etc.

haikai

I'm not an environment artist, but my suggestions:

• Try using more than one tiled texture for the bricks. You can probably give more unique UV space to areas that need it and tile the parts in between if you plan it more carefully. If you need to add some cuts to the walls to divide up how the texture tiles then it may be worth the polygon hit.
• The windows get lost in the walls. This is partly because the values are so similar and also because the bricks are too high contrast. Knock it back, let the windows and doors stand out. Either make the bricks darker than the windows and door or vice versa. See what you can get away with by getting rid of the black lines and just add touches in the corner intersections where the grooves would be deepest. Sometimes just suggesting those things is enough.
• I think it's more common for doors and windows to be laying set into the walls rather than protruding outside of them. I don't know what your budget is, but adding some more geometry would really help.
• Try adding some other details like have a strip of a different kind of stone on the bottom foundation so it's not ALL the same brick from top to bottom. Check on some references of stone churches- I'm sure there's a ton of other simple details that may be worth including.

polozad

And I think that the simplicity is good, but the colors are too fishy.

Sam Hatami

This might give you and idea or two.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1110666&postcount=4187

fearian

Wverything is square! It all looks like its made from too many right angles!

an aggressive napkin

Could I see some wires of the church? I would like to know how one would go about setting up UV space for these types of things

Mark Dygert

Off to a good start, nice work so far

The spacing between the bricks is a uniform thickness, like 2px black line, it will help give your bricks some rough and jagged edges, if you vary that line some.

You outlined just about every brick edge with a lighter color. These should be highlights. The flood every edge with highlight method, would work well for a floor tile because the light is almost always universally hitting the floor the same direction, straight on. But for wall tiles that light source is normally from above and slightly to one direction or the other.

It will help to imagine this light source as you paint, it will help guide where you place your shadows and highlights. You don't want to go too extreme with painting in lighting because then you'll be fighting whatever lighting you put in your level. The worse the material definition and lighting is in the engine the more you need to paint in. If you're using normal maps and UDK with all the bells and whistles then you don't need that much lighting painted into the diffuse. If you're on a DS with everything set to full bright then you're painting a lot of lighting info into you're diffuse.

Try to stay away from back for shadows and white for highlights. Try to pick lighter/darker shades of the same color or complimentary colors.

The surface of the stone is a little too perfectly flat, as if cut by a modern diamond saw. giving it some variance while keeping that light source in mind will help give the stone some depth.

Try to imagine one stone hanging out in front of the others, try to draw in the shadow it would cast. Do the same for the parts that indent like the corners of stones that might of been rounded off slightly.

It helps to zoom out, take a step back and squint at what you're working on. This will help you to see what the major shapes and colors are doing.

Here's a break down of a quickie paint over I did.



It might also be a good idea to change the topology and unwrap it in a slightly different way so you can take advantage of a well known technique called thirding. The few polys you'll add to it will be made up for with less individual textures used and more detailed added. Shaving a few tris really isn't all its cracked up to be anyway and the pay off is great.

Thirding as explained by Ben Mathis:
http://www.poopinmymouth.com/process/tips/thirding.jpg

Hand painting tips:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=71942
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=75700
http://wiki.polycount.com/TexturingTutorials

Jungsik

Vig is so pro <_<

Baddcog

i don't like the cracks that go through 2 stones. normally one brick might crack but not straight through one next to it also.

but you have a pretty good start.

Oleg

First of all , I want thanks everyone for taking time to help me out on this.

3DVlad and frell ,I see what you mean there , the overall shape does need some work. Thanks for the heads up.



madmuffin ,I think you totally right about " getting my own style " the thing is that I don't make a lot of hand painted textures and games like wow just pushed me to it.
I just might buy Torchlight for awesome texture examples.

elementrix,thanks for the paint over ,I will just practice and practice a lot on my own style till I get it right. The thing now is , when I create something it does look a lot different then my old work so I defo need to work here. btw Right now I use intius3 , Do you think its worth buying a cintiq ? it does look nice but is it worth it ?

haikai , thanks for the tips man very useful I will use then on my next texture for sure.

polozad, yea now I compared it with other colours and they do look bad . btw Is it a good idea to paint first a black and white texture and then pain it with colours ?

MetalMind , nice church , I see how you build it very smart ! and it doesn't look repeatable. I am going to try to do the same thing with my model.

fearian , haha you are right , I edited the mesh and I hope it looks better now !

an aggressive napkin , yea sure , eventho I edited it but I am pretty sure you still can make your point.

Vig , wow man... I don't have words for this. You not only made a awesome cool tutorial out of my texture but you also gave lots of cool ideas .Thank you very much for taking time . I will definitely work a lot smarter now.


Jungsik , he-he , he is

Baddcog , I see what you mean there , it does look " stupid" I will edit it on next try ! Thanks for pointing it out.


And again I would like to thank everyone for posting helpful comment , the whole thread has been a good teacher for me. I will definitely come back here and read over it. I have learned a lot.. that's my point

Here is the update :



I think I still miss the depth part but I am getting there

itsmadman

An AO bake would be of strong help to create variation. When it comes to painterly style it takes comeing back to it and making layers and layers of color veriation that build depth. Right when u think your done u can go back and push it even more. After the AO. start paint some shadows in areas like around the door & windows. also with the shadows there should be subtle highlights that really give u depth. Good Luck

Mark Dygert

Oh hey cool, nice work!

I don't know if he can bake AO, at least not without creating a new UV channel for unique texture coordinates. The way its laid out (quite smartly I think) makes good use of tile textures and well placed, well cropped geometry.

Vailias

If he had a high poly then an AO bake would do something.
An AO bake of that church model would result in a mostly white map with a few greyish spots in it at the concave curves, and would be pointless for the texture.
Adding some color variation in via vertex painting could be nice, but then not all platforms use that, even as common as it is.

Ok a few things I see constructionwise that might help.
1: Why is the church body one big solid mesh? The extruded brick adds a lot, but do you need it as an extrusion or could you have it as an intersecting or floating piece? It would save a few cuts to the tower that you could use for texture differences instead.

Minor other things: I notice in several places the stone on one side of a corner is a different color than the stone on the other. it oughta be the same stone in construction like that.

Windows: Glad you have them floating, why aren't you using one bit transparency/alpha test on a single quad rather than using multiple geometry cuts to follow the shape on your texture?

Also the grave dirt has about as many polies in it as half your building. Collapse some verts man!

That may not be all.. but its all for now. I gotta sleep.
Keep working at it.

Oleg

yea AO sounds very nice , but I don't know how to start on it tho.. never done AO on low poly stuff.

Vailias , Thanks a lot for the handy tips , I edited the most of it.. and I saved a lot of polys on the windows. The end result also looks a lot better now. I also edited the grave dirt .

Ok , long time no update but I think its important that I say that the whole scene is for a game. Where zombies come from the fog and you need to kill them.. well not zombies but sheep's. I still need to add few flares for the lights and some random grass.




The fog screws the alpha on the bushes tho , It won't be in the game engine(I hope )

Please if you find anything that is not looking good or could be done better please do tell me

snow

Hi there, you're improving loads and I'm happy to see you persuing this!

I hope you'll fix the tiling on the road, I'm not really sure what the point of all that geometry there is on the floor either. I may have missed something. Keep on learnin'!

Oleg

Thanks for a nice comment , the floor is like a fake grid to help player use his special ability's. The player would able to select one of the grid blocks and place some stuff there.

Oleg

sorry for dubble post but I made a owl and a sheep.



the own doesn't have claws because she is just to small of a detail in game .

And I think this thread getting off topic , so I will stop posting here and make a other one later , when I have more stuff to show.

vofff

Nice Oleg your scene of mood reminds me of Torchlight!
Keep up the work and the owl and sheep looks funny:D