WIP-Hand Painted Stone Ground -first time

voc007

This is my first attempt at hand painting a texture, this will be titable, I want similar look like wow , I have read the forums and looked at some of the tutorials, but I am just making sure I am heading the right direction. Only two in middle have been done.

Any crits would be appreciated . I am using GIMP as a painting program.



and here is the update as of 2/16/11:


done by tutorial on polycount tutorial section..

(sorry for the double post below)

voc007

Here is my more detailed , left stone has some chipped like design on white and the right one has more cracks...still doesn't look right..thank you...

Mike Yevin

i didnt want to leave this with no comments, so i figured id say a few things:

first off, it looks like you spent a total of 10 minutes on this "piece". i understand its a work in progress but maybe do some more progress before posting anything up. this is especially true because the time from your first post till your second was a little over half and hour it looks like. in that time you added a total of, lets say, ten lines. do more work between your updates

also, do you have any reference at all that your using for this? a screenshot from WOW? another piece of artwork? i would STRONGLY recommend that you have a file with at least half a dozen different pictures to use as reference that you can have handy while painting. if you are already using reference, then post it up


i can almost guarantee that no one, or only a few people, are going to bother commenting on this, so i suggest you take some time (lets say 3-4 HOURS) and read some more tutorials, gather reference, and practice for a while before coming back to this.

and just because i've already written this much, ill give you some things to consider when revising

the "stones" look like they have a total of 4 colors being used within them, get some more variation or better yet, smudge some color around to get more natural tones. the shapes of your stones need some work, as they look super uniform and rather uninteresting, plus that larger one near the bottom right sticks out like a sore thumb among the rest. keep an eye on your light source (and if helpful, physically draw an arrow showing the direction of the light) because right now you have in consistancies within your highlights and shadows. hopefully that last bit helped in some way, but keep in mind im in no way a 2d painter

jimmypopali

Also try to go through the whole texture at a steady pace, rather than going all detail in one area with nothing around it. It gives you a better idea on how the texture is evolving.

voc007

Mike Yevin , okay thanks for the comments and critz, yeah I didn't do alot, on this texture...I will make a full one and repost in a few days. Thanks alot.

jimmypopali thank for your advice as well

Yeah, I will do more as suggested. I have done many real photo texturing, and found out hand painting texturing is a lot harder....I'll post in abit with more work and detail...

Thanks alot :-)

jimmypopali

I'd also recommend going here: http://wiki.polycount.com/TexturingTutorials

HEAPS of great hand painted tuts to get your head around it.

voc007

jimmypopali : thank you very much for the link...

Here is an update based on tutorials on the polycount, still getting the feel of it:

Mark Dygert

Better in some areas, but I think you need to keep practicing and dig into the reference. Look at other hand painted games, look at the actual objects you're looking to recreate, even if you're going for stylized it still needs to be grounded on the real object and there is a wealth of knowledge about the object(s) floating around.

More importantly how do you feel about it? Is there anything you think you can improve on? If so what? What did you do differently from the first and what might you do to differently on the next?

Can you describe your process so far? What kind of brush are you using? What is the layer set up like?

EDIT:
Some things to keep in mind:
Not all stones are colored the same, there is almost always variation. Think about how the stones are made, varying molten material not always the same blend. Or it was a mixture that was baked, cut and shaped and not always stacked in the same order they where made so you get some variation between the bricks.

You're creating a ground tile. As you imagine the light source you need to keep this in mind and not light it the same way you would a wall tile. Light will more than likely hitting it directly as if beams of light shot out of your head, rather than from the top of your tile to the bottom.

It's perfectly legit to model some bricks, do some bakes and create a diffuse/normal/spec map that way. You will definitely pick up some awesome skills keeping on the path you're on right now, but it can be helpful to come at problems like this in a few different ways to.

voc007

@Mark Dygert: thank you for your suggestions, I will take them in, and look into more references, I have started a new one. The last one was done in Gimp with round brush and smear of 25%. I usually use mypaint which is a lot better at blending and mixing paints, but the program does not have determined size, so it is hard to do it 512x512, it has a open canvas feature. GIMP is a bit harder to mix colors. The last image consisted of 5 layers:

solid
blend
shadows
highlights
specular

Mark Dygert

ArtRage, its $20 for 2.6 and its vastly superior to ms-paint gimp and in some regard even better than photoshop. The $40 & $80 versions have features you probably wouldn't need for a few months/years depending on how you progress, but getting a good painting app will probably be job 1.

Good luck you're off to a decent start.

Segreto

Second on the ArtRage. You'll find its much easier to use than Gimp.

I think youre off to a good start, just need to spend a little more love on the texture and keep practicing! Most important part..

voc007

@ Segreto and Mark Dygert, sorry to mention currently I am doing the artwork in Linux natively. I will keep ArtRage in mind tho, I have it on my Ipad, it is pretty good program.

Snader

Tip: work on the image as a whole, not on separate tiles.