I'm glad you're enjoying my thread bbob, and thank you lots for your advice on style vs. technicality; I will keep it in mind
As for progresss, I know it's been awhile since I've updated due to drama with curriculum at school . . . sometimes makes me want to drop out -__- But anyway! Here is a tree. Planning to create a color variant of it, either bluer or yellower, not sure, and also a cypress sapling:
500 tris. This tree is on a 1024 x 1024, but only half of the map is shown here since the other half is currently empty, as I am planning to fill it with other things.
The body of the tree here is split in 4 256 x 256 sections, of which the center two are tileable for extending the length of the mesh. The body is also tileable horizontally - thus the tree is mirrored in half with no seams. That little section of tree on the right side of the map is for the alpha cards sticking out of the tree.
Looking awesome Jessica! I keep checking hoping there's some updates to this thread.
Keep on painting loose like this. It's working great. Push some warm color to balance out the cool blues, etc. Could be the spots just brighter.
Also the lighting on your 3d model is killing the whole thing. Get a better lighting set up please. The model looks solid and the texture is awesome. But with the lighting on the right picture it's hurting it bad.
Haha yeahh, I suck at lighting - but that is actually just the UDK mesh viewport, I hadn't set up any lights. And I will look into pushing the warms. Thanks Jeff! ^_^
Love the style and great Tutorial on the rocks, I've been looking for a method that could reduce the time it takes to make something like that. I'll have to try it out later.
Place the static in a scene and make a simple 3 point lighting set up maybe. Just invert a sphere, scale it large, export it and put a simple dark grey material on it. Placing your static in that type of environment will showcase it much better.
Jeffro - Ok, I will attempt that lighting setup for my next post. So basically I put my mesh and lights in a scene contained within a sphere? Or am I misunderstanding completely? haha
Baddcog, thanks to you and a couple others, I'm totally starting to get the hang of the tiling stuff now I can't believe how utterly lost I was before lol!
Mcejn - I'm working mannn
jeremiah_bigley - I can't wait either haha
octokitty - And I really like your creepy asian twins.
snake85027 - I am just using a hard round brush with pen pressure/transfer on. But to clean up edges (the blurriness, muddiness) I go back in with a tiny %100 hard round brush in some places. To top it all off, Smart Sharpen (it's like my favorite thing ever). However, my stuff always looks blurry and muddy when I am first starting out, so maybe it is just a matter of you needing to put a little more time in - and it will look great
Yeah you can do that or just use a plane. The sphere is just easy and it looks nice. Just make sure the normals are flipped on it. Apply a simple shader to it. Then just add some lights that show off the asset well.
Thats a really cool idea to have the center two sections of the tree tileable. Seeing your progress and other's feedback has been really helpful. Keep at it!
this is seriously the best thread out there for game texturing to.. like i learned alot from ur workflow and so on
i started painting my own ones after alot of different threads + this !
Here's a small update while I continue working on my terrain sculpting and corkwood tree texture. Fixed the terrain tileables!
Still not as good as merecraft's paintover I think, haha, but still a lot better thanks to him!
Added more depth and defined the blades:
Moarrr sand:
Diminished the cartoony outline around the pebbles:
Also, here is a little sample of how they interact with each other, done up in photoshop. I ain't showing you guys my ugly terrain yet (although I have tested my textures on it myself and found there is no noticeable banding ). Soon, soon, I will have a scene to show, and not just a bunch of random textures haha!
This project is looking awesome, you are kicking ass. I will say though, watch your relative scales - your grass, pebbles, sand+pebbles, and rock all seem to be in different scales - shouldn't the lake pebbles be closer in size, on average, the the pebbles on the sand? If this isn't mowed grass, shouldn't those blades of grass be 6-7 inches long? Which would make the pebbles huge? etc.
Thanks BrontoThunder! I will be applying these to the terrain and posted here, after I sculpt it out a bit more.
Ghostscape - I guess I should have been thinking about scale when I painted that little test, but in UDK I can change the scale of each of the textures pretty easily. Then I will be able to shrink the pebbles to match the sand better, make the grass bigger, etc. I also plan on making actual grass meshes as well as other types of ground cover. So overall I think I will be dealing with most of my scaling issues once I get into UDK Thank you for the crit!
Cool painted textures! The tree is great. I think it could use a little bit more warmth to it in the lighter areas, kind of like how you have it in the grass.
Looking good, but grass is kinda weird. It reminds me of traditional oil paintings It works, but I think you can do even better. Here is some pictures, these are NOT MINE! though they might help.
its a big article, regarding environment art direction for Allods Online. Quite interesting read, but sadly, only in russian. Some pictures are self explanatory, and I guess google translator can make some sense of it.
Thank you alloa - your work is realllly inspirational to me.
coots7 -
kelll - you are the second person already to suggest more warms for tree, so I will definitely touch that up!
linkov - Wow! Thank you for those images, and that blog post is awesome. The pictures are self-explanatory, and I will definitely be reading through the text. I will try to revisit the grass texture later, after my scene is a little more complete, and see what I can do about making it better It certainly has been one of the harder tileables to nail haha...
Jessica : Love your workups and all the extras that you have done. It's been a really great and educational thread.
I was thinking that the tip of your tree could use more love. The grey is looking strange to me. I think if you layered in either some deeper muted green for depth and allowed the top branches to pop or split up the geo at the top and pulled/ twisted them to get more life out of the texture might work out for you.
However it goes, you are doing a fantastic job, I think you will go far.
Thanks katana! I will go back to the texture and see what I can do to layer in some more depth
Hey guys, I have a question: currently I am sculpting my terrain and in my concept there are hills like way far in the distance. Would you put those on a separate terrain, or just tessellate this one a lot so that it is 'bigger' (I'm guessing lots of tessellation is the same thing as making the terrain bigger since you have more to work with??) I could also use fog to fake depth I guess - and could I also scale down the trees to help fake the distance, or do you think that would look weird and obvious? :0 sorry, i am noob at this haha...
I would use 2 terrains. One for detail one for distance. You could try just painting a plane and use that almost like it was composited. Make a normal map for the plane as well. As long as it blends nicely with the front stuff could look great at a very low cost. Some DOF and fog could really sell the distance.
Thanks Chris - I hadn't thought of compositing! I will consider both techniques as I continue sculpting all the detail stuff on this one terrain. The more I work on this, the less appealing it sounds to cram everything on one terrain haha.
As far as tessellating goes, how many levels is too much/outrageous? I want a lot to work with, but I don't want to overdo it either. Also, I noticed that there is a new landscape editor in UDK - you can use 11 texture samples as opposed to the 4 you are allowed in the terrain editor - are those numbers correct? If so, I'm considering converting my terrain over to landscape editor since I currently have 7 texture samples I intend to use. Do you guys find landscape editor to be pretty legit, or is it kindof buggy due to how new it is still?
Terrain depends. If it IS going in a game engine, you might be best doing the terrain there. I haven't used SDK so I can't make any calls on it. But most engines let you use a skybox camera for distance
(In Hammer you build a 16th scale version of terrian outside player area and it gets rendered full size behind player terrain at all times. so it's costly as far as always rendering, but in Hammer the actual play 'airspace' is costly, so having a tiny model and tiny textures that cover what seems to be a huge area makes sense)
If using Max it would be a great time to use the terrain painting tools (painting vert shape, not color).
As for tessalation I think you still want to try and match the level of detail of your models. If they are fairly low, and you put them on buttery smooth terrain it won't match up all that great.
I'd probably start pretty low poly on it, get all the massive shapes in. The tessalate a little, then paint in some details for more defined shapes/smooth things out. Then if it still looks rough you can tessalate more.
Thanks Baddcog! This scene is going to be in UDK, therefore I am sculpting in UDK. What you say about the tessellation is really helpful - sometimes I forget about the bigger picture haha.
You might take a look at the Airborn mod by Neox and his group. They tackled a nice distance issue with clever painting and equally clever poly counts.
Thanks guys! katana, I am going to check out that link today - curious to see what they've done :0
Chris, I actually didn't know about Landscape until after I had started sculpting for a bit. I was hesitant to start using it because somebody told me that when I convert my Terrain actor to be compatible with Landscape, I would lose some sculpting information or something (they didn't exactly say what, and I tried researching it to no avail). So I worried about it allll yesterday, only to decide, at the end of the day, that my sculpt was so much in the beginning stages anyway that I might as well switch over.
So I am going to convert my terrain now. Talk about over-thinking things, lol
Jessica, this stuff is awesome. It's great watching you prepare for each stage with the quick concepts/references you come up with. Really well-thought out and your textures are all really strong. I think your grass texture could be improved by more refined shapes. There was a beautiful grass texture painted a while ago by someone in the WAYWO thread (here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1222194&postcount=8492).
Keep going, looking forward to seeing all this in engine.
Thanks sybrix, paulsvoboda! I will definitely be revisiting my grass for further definition. I love that texture you linked - it's amazing!
For now, here is my Corkwood trunk. It is not a full 1024 height because I'm planning to fit something above it, and this particular tree is much shorter/stouter than the Cypress and won't be needing quite as much length. There are 3 256 x 256 sections, of which the top two are tileable, and the texture also tiles horizontally. Still working on the branches/roots and foliage; in the meantime, critique and comments welcome!
Here is my concept again:
p.s. This time I'm gonna set the model up with an attempt at 3pt. lighting. For jeffro x]
Awesome texture for the wood. Just lacking some subtle colors (blues and oranges). It reads a bit flat as a result. But the overall texture is gorgeous. It's a lot tighter and not as loose/painterly as the stuff you were doing previously. But the idea and texture itself is awesome.
You're making awesome progress on this thread. Keep it up.
Hmm, for the color, I do have blues for shadows, and the whole texture is already orange - so do you mean to add in some splashes of more saturated blues and oranges, and exaggerate what I have?
Ah, I didn't mean for this to look very different from my other textures! Maybe I will make the leaves nice and painterly to balance out haha - I definitely don't want there to be style discrepancies in my environment. Thank you for the critique!
Replies
I'm glad you're enjoying my thread bbob, and thank you lots for your advice on style vs. technicality; I will keep it in mind
As for progresss, I know it's been awhile since I've updated due to drama with curriculum at school . . . sometimes makes me want to drop out -__- But anyway! Here is a tree. Planning to create a color variant of it, either bluer or yellower, not sure, and also a cypress sapling:
500 tris. This tree is on a 1024 x 1024, but only half of the map is shown here since the other half is currently empty, as I am planning to fill it with other things.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
The body of the tree here is split in 4 256 x 256 sections, of which the center two are tileable for extending the length of the mesh. The body is also tileable horizontally - thus the tree is mirrored in half with no seams. That little section of tree on the right side of the map is for the alpha cards sticking out of the tree.
Uploaded with ImageShack.us
Critique and comments welcome,
Thanks! Jessica
Keep on painting loose like this. It's working great. Push some warm color to balance out the cool blues, etc. Could be the spots just brighter.
Also the lighting on your 3d model is killing the whole thing. Get a better lighting set up please. The model looks solid and the texture is awesome. But with the lighting on the right picture it's hurting it bad.
Again, great stuff.
Looks like you got the tiling aspects down pretty well now too.
Jeffro - Ok, I will attempt that lighting setup for my next post. So basically I put my mesh and lights in a scene contained within a sphere? Or am I misunderstanding completely? haha
Baddcog, thanks to you and a couple others, I'm totally starting to get the hang of the tiling stuff now
Mcejn - I'm working mannn
jeremiah_bigley - I can't wait either haha
octokitty - And I really like your creepy asian twins.
snake85027 - I am just using a hard round brush with pen pressure/transfer on. But to clean up edges (the blurriness, muddiness) I go back in with a tiny %100 hard round brush in some places. To top it all off, Smart Sharpen (it's like my favorite thing ever). However, my stuff always looks blurry and muddy when I am first starting out, so maybe it is just a matter of you needing to put a little more time in - and it will look great
Will do jeffro! Thank you
i started painting my own ones after alot of different threads + this !
Thankyou !
Here's a small update while I continue working on my terrain sculpting and corkwood tree texture. Fixed the terrain tileables!
Still not as good as merecraft's paintover I think, haha, but still a lot better thanks to him!
Added more depth and defined the blades:
Moarrr sand:
Diminished the cartoony outline around the pebbles:
Also, here is a little sample of how they interact with each other, done up in photoshop. I ain't showing you guys my ugly terrain yet
Critique and comments welcome,
Thanks! Jessica
All of these textures are brilliant, actually - I think it would be cool to see them applied to more things like that tree.
Ghostscape - I guess I should have been thinking about scale when I painted that little test, but in UDK I can change the scale of each of the textures pretty easily. Then I will be able to shrink the pebbles to match the sand better, make the grass bigger, etc. I also plan on making actual grass meshes as well as other types of ground cover. So overall I think I will be dealing with most of my scaling issues once I get into UDK
This scene looks very nice!
I will follow this thread.
they are from here: http://shurick.livejournal.com/195876.html
its a big article, regarding environment art direction for Allods Online. Quite interesting read, but sadly, only in russian. Some pictures are self explanatory, and I guess google translator can make some sense of it.
coots7 -
kelll - you are the second person already to suggest more warms for tree, so I will definitely touch that up!
linkov - Wow! Thank you for those images, and that blog post is awesome. The pictures are self-explanatory, and I will definitely be reading through the text. I will try to revisit the grass texture later, after my scene is a little more complete, and see what I can do about making it better
I was thinking that the tip of your tree could use more love. The grey is looking strange to me. I think if you layered in either some deeper muted green for depth and allowed the top branches to pop or split up the geo at the top and pulled/ twisted them to get more life out of the texture might work out for you.
However it goes, you are doing a fantastic job, I think you will go far.
Hey guys, I have a question: currently I am sculpting my terrain and in my concept there are hills like way far in the distance. Would you put those on a separate terrain, or just tessellate this one a lot so that it is 'bigger' (I'm guessing lots of tessellation is the same thing as making the terrain bigger since you have more to work with??) I could also use fog to fake depth I guess - and could I also scale down the trees to help fake the distance, or do you think that would look weird and obvious? :0 sorry, i am noob at this haha...
Here is the concept again:
Thanks!
Jessica
Your work is pretty inspiring! Love your style
As far as tessellating goes, how many levels is too much/outrageous? I want a lot to work with, but I don't want to overdo it either. Also, I noticed that there is a new landscape editor in UDK - you can use 11 texture samples as opposed to the 4 you are allowed in the terrain editor - are those numbers correct? If so, I'm considering converting my terrain over to landscape editor since I currently have 7 texture samples I intend to use. Do you guys find landscape editor to be pretty legit, or is it kindof buggy due to how new it is still?
(In Hammer you build a 16th scale version of terrian outside player area and it gets rendered full size behind player terrain at all times. so it's costly as far as always rendering, but in Hammer the actual play 'airspace' is costly, so having a tiny model and tiny textures that cover what seems to be a huge area makes sense)
If using Max it would be a great time to use the terrain painting tools (painting vert shape, not color).
As for tessalation I think you still want to try and match the level of detail of your models. If they are fairly low, and you put them on buttery smooth terrain it won't match up all that great.
I'd probably start pretty low poly on it, get all the massive shapes in. The tessalate a little, then paint in some details for more defined shapes/smooth things out. Then if it still looks rough you can tessalate more.
http://www.moddb.com/mods/airborn/
Landscape handles tessellation much better. (http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Landscape.html)
Chris, I actually didn't know about Landscape until after I had started sculpting for a bit. I was hesitant to start using it because somebody told me that when I convert my Terrain actor to be compatible with Landscape, I would lose some sculpting information or something (they didn't exactly say what, and I tried researching it to no avail). So I worried about it allll yesterday, only to decide, at the end of the day, that my sculpt was so much in the beginning stages anyway that I might as well switch over.
So I am going to convert my terrain now. Talk about over-thinking things, lol
I'm also pretty excited to see this completed. *subscribe*
Keep going, looking forward to seeing all this in engine.
For now, here is my Corkwood trunk. It is not a full 1024 height because I'm planning to fit something above it, and this particular tree is much shorter/stouter than the Cypress and won't be needing quite as much length. There are 3 256 x 256 sections, of which the top two are tileable, and the texture also tiles horizontally. Still working on the branches/roots and foliage; in the meantime, critique and comments welcome!
Here is my concept again:
p.s. This time I'm gonna set the model up with an attempt at 3pt. lighting. For jeffro x]
Awesome texture for the wood. Just lacking some subtle colors (blues and oranges). It reads a bit flat as a result. But the overall texture is gorgeous. It's a lot tighter and not as loose/painterly as the stuff you were doing previously. But the idea and texture itself is awesome.
You're making awesome progress on this thread. Keep it up.
Ah, I didn't mean for this to look very different from my other textures! Maybe I will make the leaves nice and painterly to balance out haha - I definitely don't want there to be style discrepancies in my environment. Thank you for the critique!