Thanks guys...
Was bored for a while today, so i did ... a plank of wood...
Looking for crits on it, but don't want this turning into another wood painting thread!
Ah, i was under the impression that with things like flooring its best to do an overall "above" angle lighting, not directional.. is this incorrect? Will fiddle with this a bit more.
Also, i'll probably do another paintover for you if you'd like, but for now: While the anatomy and proportions are pretty nice, you are falling into the exact same pitfall with this second texture. The major masses are not defined at all. You obviously don't want to hammer too much unnecessary, fixed lighting into a texture, but you definitely need more than in your current wip. Check out some b1ll textures.
And don't get too caught up on details! This came up on a google image search for head planes and it's an awesome illustration of the point of them -- clearly defining the major shapes with shadow and light is what sells your character. Everything else is window dressing.
@B1ll textures, mind = blown. Those are awesome.
For the sake of practising faces (and the fact that i don't feel like painting a robo suit) i think i'll change SDK back to a single head model, they seem good practise and quick to start over again on. Paint over on new model would be grealy appreciated.
Any suggestions on a good, well layed out head SDK other then bobo's one? Also, should i paint the next one at a larger res? Maybe a 512 instead of a 256, would be nice to be able to do broader brush strokes then poking around with a pixel brush )
Edit:
Probs guna have a crack at this one: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57704
I would paint the next one at a larger res since you are just practicing anyway, why not give yourself a bit more space? [: Looks like you made pretty cool progress in this thread, and yeah those b1ll textures are really instructive!! Will be referencing those for my first character for sure hahaha...
It's hard to say whether you should work big or small to practice -- small FORCES you to ignore detail, which is very very good, but big is generally way easier to deal with in digital formats.
edit: pow! Not very good painting, but hopefully this helps/clarifies what ive been saying a bit.
I'm not gonna do a flashy paintover or give crits because I'm not qualified to comment by any means, but one little thing that helped me a LOT when I did hand painted face textures:
his lips are a very odd shape. the philtrum/philtral columns under the nose are way too wide. the little peaks in the lips should be under the nostrils, not on either side of the nose.
Hey there, making good progress. Did a quick paintover that might help you out, sorry for the quality just got a mouse and photoshop 6 here at work (tech support job, heh).
Main changes are defining the nose using some darker colors on the sides, adjusted his lips, changed a bit of the shading around his brow. I didn't want to have it be too far a leap from what you had, figured it'd be easier to possibly implement that way.
Ahh nice one! that bottom lip looks so much better also digging the nose changes, will get right on it So easy to not realise what things look like after you've been staring at the texture for so long, then once somebody points it out its suddenly so obvious...!
No problem, I've actually never really done any texturing but I've seen enough of other people's stuff here over the years.
One other thing I forgot to mention (and forgot to illustrate in my paintover) - try not to make the whites of his eyes so "white", his eyes as a whole are all reading pretty bright right now, might consider adding in some reds/shadow at each side edge and sort of make them more of an off white cream sort of color.
Finally had some time to do some personal art work, woohoo!
Been adding some changes as suggested by Two Listen, also made changes to the pallete to make it a bit more interesting and not so flat.
Also started a new model which is extremely WIP still, havnt really textured anything apart from some block outs and a little bit of face tones
Havn't really spent alot of time painting cloth, are there many good examples/walk throughs out there for it? i want to go for that really crip, sharp edged folded look.
I'd strongly suggest to make a realistic head model and texture first. Just find am actual person and capture their essence in lowpoly. To make a good stylized character is very hard, and you need a solid understanding of realism before you can pull it off convincingly.
you've got some strange shapes going on in the texture, notably the lips/nose area and forehead, and everything feels very undefined except for the eyes, which are very sharp and bright.
Here's a little quicky I did for your molten guy. Try using a harder brush. A large percentage of all my painting is with a 100% hard square brush, with a more brush-like eraser... gets kind of a nice mix.
Paint in some broad shapes first, moar darks & lights. Definie your main shapes of your rock chunks, then go in and paint some highlighted edges to really make it feel like he's got some creased rock elements.
Again here, focus a bit moar on larger shapes before diving into detail too quickly. Once you paint your face's shape to be just right and look how you want it, then you can dive into details.
Another thing to keep in mind, never paint your eyeballs white. The value of the whites of your eyes are really not too far away from the rest of your skin.
The painting of the black guy's face uses too much air brush. I only use that brush after getting about 50% of the way with harder brushes just to help pop out a few shapes, then back to a harder brush.
Wow, thanks for taking the time to do the paint overs. The values you put into the face is pretty rad, and everything looks a lot better proportioned, i'll have to try another paint up for that SDK. Whenever I paint eyes i always just think "EYES ARE WHITE" and just paint them that way, completely forgetting that the value for the eyes is just going to pop right out and be in your face, so thanks for pointing that out.
As for the lava golem paint over, i do like the crispness of the edges that you've added, but i can't help feeling it's been pushed into a different style and rendered more as steel instead of rock! If that was just to emphasise on the planes for me to understand,though, then i see what your getting at.
Your eyes are still way too white. What you could do is create a new layer in Photoshop, change it to overlay, and paint with some 30% dark grays and 60-70% light grays to help define some of your shapes without getting rid of detail work you've already done.
The upper lip is a downfacing plane, so you generally want to make the upper lip much darker than the lower lip (unless the lighting is from below ofcourse). Also, the part of the brow under the eyebrows could stand to be much darker, and the forehead lighter. You'll want to put a cast shadow under the nose and the lower lip, as well.
I would also make the ears much darker, so that they visually recede from the front of the face. Right now they really stand out.
Aside from that, you'll want to select MUCH more saturated colors to paint your shadows with. Right now, all the shading looks very greyed out. Your shadows could also stand to be much darker in general.
Furthermore, when defining the dark and light planes of the face, it's best to use harsher, more angular transitions, rather than blurry gradients. To avoid blurriness, I really recommend using hard brushes rather than soft brushes. Create your transitions by layering strokes with a hard brush, rather than one stroke with a soft brush. You'll get the best results if you use fairly high opacity (for instance 50%) and handpick more inbetween shades. If you use low opacity and only pick one shadow color, the inbetween shades tend to become very muddy and unsaturated.
I'd leave out pores and stubble for now, and just work on the main forms and colors instead.
I did a paintover before you posted your update, here it is:
That paintover.... blew my mind! Really helpful and looks great too
So, here's a new rendition of my face texture, 100% hard brush work (used hard brushes before but im a smudge tool addict). Could probably use a few more pink/red tones in there instead of browns
Can't help feeling it still looks bad, having trouble realising why .
Thanks for the great input everyone!
Thanks Jess, although i can't help feel that i'm being spoon fed by all these great paint overs! Is it bad to work from example like this? Should i be seeing errors and fixes myself?
Well, after having looked through this thread, it seems like you are already trying your best for every pass you do. There is nothing wrong with learning from paintovers and critiques - actually that is the point xD It's not like it's easy to learn from the paintovers anyway - you don't just absorb the new knowledge through osmosis. In order to learn it, you have to practice it, so you can pat yourself on the back for that Everybody had to learn from somewhere!
Another update, i was pretty happy with the skin tones and values so i decided to go in and add some manliness back into the texture with some small wrinkles, imperfections and stubble.
Just wanted to show you what some tonal variances does to skin:
Blueish black under the eyes, reds under the nose, grey 5 o clock shadow, and some yellows under the mouth.
I added a bit of orange on the fringes of everything to simulate the sub surface scattering, and added a very very very slight grain (not film grain, but a full coloured grain at 5% in a linear dodge layer) to simulate the subcellaneous layer of skin.
For details, I added some bluish green vericose veins, red freckles, and brown liver spots.
Then went over it with a VERY VERY slight bluish-white specular.
Having all the colours wrestle against each other is what makes for more believable skin.
@ Funkdelic, thanks alot! Hope you continue to follow @Jacque Ahhhh very nice, and thanks alot for the write up to go with the paint over. My skin tones always struggle with this... i start off trying to add some variation in, but then they all end up being flat shades of brown or pinky red all over. Probably my brain focusing too much on values instead of colour AND value at the same time.
I've seen pig brains tut a few times, i think it was linked earlier on in this thread too, It's got a ton of nifty tricks in, like the beveled wrinkle layer etc which i used on both the heads! I also read about that noise layer somewhere else too, i think it was in one of the Digital Painting techniques books, a ton of great stuff in there for skin too like doing freckles. Just need to figure out how to mix everything together better haha.
Heres robin with a colour overlay layer added, Next time i'll try and paint with the correct hues from the start, but i guess this will be a quick fix for this one...
Replies
I can't draw worth a shit, more less paint textures! awesome that you're learning! gogogo!
edit:
I animated this character some years back
Was bored for a while today, so i did ... a plank of wood...
Looking for crits on it, but don't want this turning into another wood painting thread!
your cuts are too similar to your wood grain. color/depth, etc
And don't get too caught up on details! This came up on a google image search for head planes and it's an awesome illustration of the point of them -- clearly defining the major shapes with shadow and light is what sells your character. Everything else is window dressing.
For the sake of practising faces (and the fact that i don't feel like painting a robo suit) i think i'll change SDK back to a single head model, they seem good practise and quick to start over again on. Paint over on new model would be grealy appreciated.
Any suggestions on a good, well layed out head SDK other then bobo's one? Also, should i paint the next one at a larger res? Maybe a 512 instead of a 256, would be nice to be able to do broader brush strokes then poking around with a pixel brush
Edit:
Probs guna have a crack at this one:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57704
Edit: mmmm gotta fix those rosey red cheeks
Edit again:
Fixed them cheeks..
Additional directional light, not sure if its too much though (its on another layer, can easily tone down!)
It's hard to say whether you should work big or small to practice -- small FORCES you to ignore detail, which is very very good, but big is generally way easier to deal with in digital formats.
edit: pow! Not very good painting, but hopefully this helps/clarifies what ive been saying a bit.
Update on the head:
I'm not gonna do a flashy paintover or give crits because I'm not qualified to comment by any means, but one little thing that helped me a LOT when I did hand painted face textures:
http://www.pig-brain.com/tut01/ap_facetut.pdf
I saw that walk through a while back, i was looking for it actually! it's really useful, thanks for the link
So i can, A, Ignore the topology and just paint in normal shaped lips, or B, move some verts about.
I suggest trying to go in and use harder edged brushes and working with higher contrasts/different values.
Have you tried pigbrains tutorial?
Main changes are defining the nose using some darker colors on the sides, adjusted his lips, changed a bit of the shading around his brow. I didn't want to have it be too far a leap from what you had, figured it'd be easier to possibly implement that way.
Good luck. :thumbup:
One other thing I forgot to mention (and forgot to illustrate in my paintover) - try not to make the whites of his eyes so "white", his eyes as a whole are all reading pretty bright right now, might consider adding in some reds/shadow at each side edge and sort of make them more of an off white cream sort of color.
Something to play around with anyway.
Been adding some changes as suggested by Two Listen, also made changes to the pallete to make it a bit more interesting and not so flat.
Also started a new model which is extremely WIP still, havnt really textured anything apart from some block outs and a little bit of face tones
Havn't really spent alot of time painting cloth, are there many good examples/walk throughs out there for it? i want to go for that really crip, sharp edged folded look.
Today i made a new head mesh to practise with, this is my WIP so far, looking for crits!
@DemonPrincess Sounds like a plan, i'll have a crack at doing something more realistic very soon!
can you post the diffuse?
Here you go Sec, i havn't added anything yet since the last post. Everything is very soft edged at the moment besides the eye like you mentioned.
Paint in some broad shapes first, moar darks & lights. Definie your main shapes of your rock chunks, then go in and paint some highlighted edges to really make it feel like he's got some creased rock elements.
Another thing to keep in mind, never paint your eyeballs white. The value of the whites of your eyes are really not too far away from the rest of your skin.
The painting of the black guy's face uses too much air brush. I only use that brush after getting about 50% of the way with harder brushes just to help pop out a few shapes, then back to a harder brush.
As for the lava golem paint over, i do like the crispness of the edges that you've added, but i can't help feeling it's been pushed into a different style and rendered more as steel instead of rock! If that was just to emphasise on the planes for me to understand,though, then i see what your getting at.
Thanks again!
Alas, if you wanna go rock I might suggest just making it a-symmetrical :P. Symmetry always makes things look like it's constructed from a machine.
WIP still.. Apart from the eyes being a bit too high value (AGAIN, i suck) and him wearing lip gloss, any crits so far?
Edit: shit i've mirrored the eye reflections in the wrong direction, will fix.
Looks a lot better!
The upper lip is a downfacing plane, so you generally want to make the upper lip much darker than the lower lip (unless the lighting is from below ofcourse). Also, the part of the brow under the eyebrows could stand to be much darker, and the forehead lighter. You'll want to put a cast shadow under the nose and the lower lip, as well.
I would also make the ears much darker, so that they visually recede from the front of the face. Right now they really stand out.
Aside from that, you'll want to select MUCH more saturated colors to paint your shadows with. Right now, all the shading looks very greyed out. Your shadows could also stand to be much darker in general.
Furthermore, when defining the dark and light planes of the face, it's best to use harsher, more angular transitions, rather than blurry gradients. To avoid blurriness, I really recommend using hard brushes rather than soft brushes. Create your transitions by layering strokes with a hard brush, rather than one stroke with a soft brush. You'll get the best results if you use fairly high opacity (for instance 50%) and handpick more inbetween shades. If you use low opacity and only pick one shadow color, the inbetween shades tend to become very muddy and unsaturated.
I'd leave out pores and stubble for now, and just work on the main forms and colors instead.
I did a paintover before you posted your update, here it is:
Hope that helps!
So, here's a new rendition of my face texture, 100% hard brush work (used hard brushes before but im a smudge tool addict). Could probably use a few more pink/red tones in there instead of browns
Can't help feeling it still looks bad, having trouble realising why
Thanks for the great input everyone!
Another update, i was pretty happy with the skin tones and values so i decided to go in and add some manliness back into the texture with some small wrinkles, imperfections and stubble.
Blueish black under the eyes, reds under the nose, grey 5 o clock shadow, and some yellows under the mouth.
I added a bit of orange on the fringes of everything to simulate the sub surface scattering, and added a very very very slight grain (not film grain, but a full coloured grain at 5% in a linear dodge layer) to simulate the subcellaneous layer of skin.
For details, I added some bluish green vericose veins, red freckles, and brown liver spots.
Then went over it with a VERY VERY slight bluish-white specular.
Having all the colours wrestle against each other is what makes for more believable skin.
BTW check out the tutorial written by Jon Rush
http://www.pig-brain.com/tut01/tut01_01.htm
I'm following it from the beggining and I can see clearly that you´ve evolved a lot!
keep up mate
@Jacque Ahhhh very nice, and thanks alot for the write up to go with the paint over. My skin tones always struggle with this... i start off trying to add some variation in, but then they all end up being flat shades of brown or pinky red all over. Probably my brain focusing too much on values instead of colour AND value at the same time.
I've seen pig brains tut a few times, i think it was linked earlier on in this thread too, It's got a ton of nifty tricks in, like the beveled wrinkle layer etc which i used on both the heads! I also read about that noise layer somewhere else too, i think it was in one of the Digital Painting techniques books, a ton of great stuff in there for skin too like doing freckles. Just need to figure out how to mix everything together better haha.
Heres robin with a colour overlay layer added, Next time i'll try and paint with the correct hues from the start, but i guess this will be a quick fix for this one...
huge improvements with this head, though!
i do think hes a bit too red lol
Edit: