Hand painting grass and dirt
polycounter lvl 11
I've had some experience with stone and wood, but im still stumped on how you deal with grass or dirt..
Heres two textures from WoW
Grass: Im wondering how you would go about making a grass texture like this, or just some techniques in general. I really don't know where to start...
Dirt: Im even more lost with dirt. It really doesn't make any sense to me, and why do all of WoW's dirt textures look like they were painted over real pictures of dirt.
Could someone please post up some techniques for grass and dirt please?
Thanks
Heres two textures from WoW
Grass: Im wondering how you would go about making a grass texture like this, or just some techniques in general. I really don't know where to start...
Dirt: Im even more lost with dirt. It really doesn't make any sense to me, and why do all of WoW's dirt textures look like they were painted over real pictures of dirt.
Could someone please post up some techniques for grass and dirt please?
Thanks
Replies
Same thing should work for dirt but with some rocks instead.
I dont really see how that could work for the dirt. I get the whole rock part, but just the plain 'dirt' under the rocks im not sure how to make.
http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials/2d_custombrushes3/2d_custombrushes3_1.php
These may also be helpful if you're really new to custom brushes:
http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials/2d_custombrushes/2d_custombrushes.php
http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials/2d_custombrushes2/2d_custombrushes2.php
Any more input on the dirt though? Im stumped on just getting a 'dirt' look as a base.
Im really in need of major guidance, and its crazy how little tutorials there are for things like this.
My ridiculously horrible attempt
about creating grass .. you can check out a thechnique adam share on his wip environment here
the result is not the same pic you post .. but it's a really cool technique that you can use
You know, the truth is man, I don't think many people at all create grass textures from scratch. I, and many others, would completely understand your desire as an artist to create EVERYTHING from absolute scratch, but the truth is, why give yourself more work when you can get around these things using well known tricks?
I guess what I'm saying is, there's nothing wrong with using photo's of actual grass and dirt to get your textures going. Nothing to be ashamed of. You are taking from nature exactly the same way as you would take from it without using photos anyways!
So, this is all my opinion and take it how you want it, but in this day and age of digital art and what-not, it's better to work SMARTER than HARDER, you know? Just my opinion.
ayoub44, heres my result from that link. Seems like a decent method that I may use in the future.
ZacD, thanks for that link. Just translated it and going to poke around, looks very interesting.
Im very happy with it, but im afraid I just barely surpassed the 'painted' look. Id like other peoples' opinions though
Here it is after a small smart blur pass to ease out the detail
So what one is more fit for a hand painted grass?
Thanks to everyone else who posted also!
Ill work up a dirt texture and see how it goes.
Heres a second version:
the grass texture turned out nice.
take this as an example. Your imaginary light source should be more from the top. It can ofc be angled a bit to not make the lighting too flat.
If you shade the top of the rocks lighter and increase the contact shadows you will increase the depth of your texture.
That doesnt mean that it needs to be high contrast. It can still be rather low contrast to help with tiling.
Looks great! Did you handpaint each individual blade of grass, or use the sprite overlay technique in that tutorial from Allods Online?
Heres some editing on the dirt
Going to work on highlights now
Heres a cleaned up version
What one fits better?
(i.e. paint larger areas on a larger canvas)
also you might want to use "ndo" to generate a normal map and light the texture a little, adds more depth and mood
If you took that into Unreal, you could make a material blend using the grass as a mask to get the grass/dirt blend really sharp and not just slowly fade out as you've done up there. Saying that, I am aware it's just a Photoshop mockup.
The original was obviously either photosourced or in any event transformed one clump of grass by stretching, scaling and rotating it. It's not awful, but it's clear it didn't receive even half the love and attention you gave your texture.
Having said that, I'd suggest some more colour variation. I'd shift the highlights more towards the yellowish-green than what you currently have, and maybe ease off the dark strokes lining each individual blade of grass a bit. Reserve those for a few, not all, and you'll get a much less noisy texture.
It might also be nice to bring some bigger shapes into play. Right now it reads as really flat, trampled grass, which is fine, but you could simulate clumping a bit more and shade things as if they're not individual blades. Some types of grass could be trampled flat sort of like this, but even those would spring up a tiny bit, I think.
You did a no-no for the dirt texture though, you tiled the larger rocks 2x2 within your texture. This makes it extremely repetitive. Very hard to fix with just small tweaks here and there. Better to either crop the entire thing to just one of the 1/4 corners, or else don't crop but re-do the stones for the other 3/4 of the texture.
I think the "broken glass" comment was because you have a one-pixel edge highlight on many of the stones (making them look thin like glass shards), and those highlights are coming from different directions (like glass refraction). Try removing those highlights?
to this
Very nice improvement, it's nice to see you pouring refinement in order to achieve the quality you are looking for. Great eye.
The dirt texture is pretty nice, however I think the small pieces of rocks are all too uniform and having them at the same scale will produce much repeated noise once tiled. Why not exploring the options of having fewer rocks with different scales and shapes, this would provide some variation and ease when tiled.