Low poly hand painted sword
polycounter lvl 12
I decided to take a crack at a low poly hand-painted prop and here's my WIP. I really want to get better at making hand painted props, so any crits, tips, and comments are greatly appreciated.
Note: I know the UVs are rather unoptimized right now. Let's say if I were to redo the UVs at 512 x 1024, how should I go about maximizing the UV space if doing so creates stretching?
Tri count: 352
UDK Shot:
Everything else:
Note: I know the UVs are rather unoptimized right now. Let's say if I were to redo the UVs at 512 x 1024, how should I go about maximizing the UV space if doing so creates stretching?
Tri count: 352
UDK Shot:
Everything else:
Replies
It's coming along nicely. I think it would look a lot better with a darker color for the handle, and it looks like there's some stretching or something going on with the handle wrapping. Is the red parts metal? If so the coloring needs more contrast and popping highlights to give it that shiny metal look.
In regards to the UVs: Should I re-pack the UVs at a 2:1 ratio or should I remain at the same ratio, but break up the UV pieces and maximize them to optimize UV space?
Yup.
I really like the color on the blades. The middle part seems a little noisy though, with all of the red stuff going on.
As you can see, like your sword, this has subtle glowing parts and an ornamental blade. There are two light sources, the sky (white) and the colour of the glow effect (purple)which effects the hue of all the colours on the sword. The thinner part of the sword has shadowing on it, which is a very slight purple tint, as with the stock of the sword too. the base colours vary, but all the LIGHTING stays purple in some way. The sky (white) is effecting the parts furthest from the purple glowing letters on the blade, like the edges of the blade or tips of the handle. This helps the painting "pop" and helps define material types.
The painting technique itself, if you look, you can see there are a strong mix of very smooth and subtle gradients and sharp edges. The sharp edges also change in diameter a lot to give a subtle wearing effect.
Think about the size of your weapon too. On the blizzard reference pic there is small detail, but never too close together or too small for it to read. big, fat and sharp edged damage, painted on the hard edges of the model to help break up the lines a little.
What strikes me the most about your current sword WIP is the lack of light direction and colour consistancy. Those little blue glowing parts need to be lighting edges near to them and deep desaturated blues for shadowing would be great (the new version of the grip you painted is looking nearer to this but needs the lighting pushed).
I'm with Gsokol on the text on the sword, it's just adding noise right now, some other pattern which is easier on the eye would be nice, if not, just something simple to keep it clean.
If you are struggling with the whole light direction thing, just go into a 3D app, make some random shaped object with lots of variation and stick a point light at the top of it, see how much that light effects everything on the model in different intensities. Observation is key!
Get the light sources and a decent pallete sorted out, once you've got a good flow of things, then go through and tighten up all the details.
But hey, i'm no expert at this either
UV map looking much better without all the wasted space too.
Edit: this pic shows lighting from a stronger glow effect:
And regarding your UV question: this is probably not the smartest thing to do, but whenever I need my UVs to fit rectangle (512*256, 128*256 etc.), I'm usually doing my UVs in 1:1 ratio, but then I place my UV islands into desired rectangle (within 1:1 space), render UV template, crop that image in photoshop to size I need, apply it as a texture and then go back to unwrap and scale/distort my UVs, so they fit this template.
sounds complicated, and perhaps there is better solutions, but its only couple minutes really, so I don't bother to look for another way :poly136:
just wanted to chime in and say, with the amount of information on your texture you could easily halve the size and not lose anything. that large a sheet for this style of diffuse is o-o-o-o-overkill
Here's some corrections to the geometry:
@Gorman: What exactly do you mean by "bulk it out?" Make the guard and the blade more distinct from each other? Something like this?
But, that is just a suggestion
Awesome advice in here. World of Warcraft swords are a pretty good reference point for low poly swords with epic hand-painted textures.
Here's a small nit-pick I just noticed. Be careful with evenly spaced and symmetrical damage. On the blade you have 2 nicks directly across from each other, and the three on the left side of the blade are too evenly spaced apart. It looks too calculated/obvious. I suggest making it more "random" looking and varied.
P.S: Please be as nitpicky as you want to. These are the kinds of crits I need.
Texture update:
Handle wraps WIP
Here's another iteration of the blade/hilt silhouette
The first iteration is the one I'm currently working on. The second iteration is a reworked to give it a bit more of a traditional sword look with a bulkier forte.
I'm honestly willing to work with either one. However, the second iteration creates a little more room to work with. I just wanted to get some feedback on that before I continue fixing up the textures on the blade.
Also, turn off viewport shading. I'm usually paint my textures in 'flat' mode. If it look good without any lighting, it will look good with shading too. The reason for this, is that hand-painted 'style' (most of the time) implies a lot of baked lighting directly in your diffuse texture. So basically, while you painting, you need to see where your painted shadows and highlights are. Hardware shading, especially with dark or completely black ambient color won't let you do it. Your final result should look good in both dark and bright environments. And while in shadows your sword may look fine, somewhere in hand-painted daylight it may turn to be completely flat.
Texture update!
Crits/Comments are appreciated.
Maybe consider extending the pharoah headdress to where the blade indents, and have the extruding horns be that naturally thinner part:
@Linkov: Great suggestions. I might play around with the Egyptian theme.
@DonKarnage: Great suggestion as well. I'll extend the design on the "headdress".
read this: http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm
its explaining a lot of what you need to know.
Crits and comments are greatly appreciated.
Pushed the dark on the bottom of the hilt and popped the purple stripes with a darker edge. Added a slightly higher highlight across the ridge of the hilt as well. Also added a nick on it that could probably be a little larger for a little character.
The handle I just pushed the dark along the side of the straps with some deep purple I sampled from the dark spots of the blade and then brightened the end of the handle and popped the highlights a little harder on corners.
I like the blade personally, I think you really nailed it with your last pass.
Great job, just push those darks a little harder to push that depth and pop those high lights to really make it shine.
Edit: also noticed the handle wrapping seems a bit large around it, might be better to reduce the texture down and tile it a couple of times, but still keep the UVs the same, as the section where the handle meets the hilt could do with some soft shadows.
I'll definitely make the handle wraps pop out better and add some highlights on the guard.
@impala: I don't know if I want to change the overall shape of the blade at this point, BUT I could possibly to a separate iteration of it and adjust the texture to fit it. I'll try to incorporate some of your other crits. I can definitely add the subtle shadows and make the blue running up the blade more apparent.
Crits/comments are appreciated.
I was wondering about what would be a good way to render out hand painted props for presentation. I've noticed that a lot of hand painted artists have rendered their props with an outline, so I gave 3DSMax's "Ink n Paint" material a go. I just wanted to get some feedback on the render and presentation. Crits on anything else are more than welcome.
There is two things you could change if you want. Red stripes on these 'horn' thingies could reflect a bit less of that green light. And second, grip is highlighted only from one side. Its not a big deal, but kinda strange.
As for rendering, there is always 'flat' viewport render + PS outline
ps. There is always room for improvements, I can actually see more than just two things to do better, but I would suggest moving on
Generally with handpainted props, you'll want to put the self illumination to around 50-75%.
Also (personal preference) to get the image sharper looking, use Catmul-Rom, with no texture filtering in the render.
Congrats!
which is pretty much the same as unsharpen mask in photoshop, a different approach without a sharpen filter would be to set the area sampler to 1 pixel width. I pefer this as catmul rom often enough creates "outlines" around your object.
Nice sword!
@linkov: you sound, well you describe stuff like you know all this, is someone that has alot of experiance. and sorry for my typos, English is not my first language. but anyways i like the way you describe and explain his model. i would like from both of you give me some feed backs from my model.
Great feedback from people and great outcome. Good work man!
@linkov: Thank you for the crits and rendering tips. I can go back and make some quick adjustments for the sake of portfolio, otherwise I'm ready to move onto other projects. Thanks for all your crits along the way. I really appreciate it.
@Jacques Choi: I could try re-rendering the prop at 50-75% self illumination. it would be enough to add shadow and allow a lighting setup. heheh.
@Eduram: Thanks for the crits. I was going for a WoW or MMO-style weapon. Dirt could be added, but I don't think it goes with the style I'm going for. I didn't use any sort of sculpting or normal mapping for this prop; I'm just using 1 diffuse map.