Paintover workflow for environments

garko

I'm wondering about how would be the better workflow for an environment design.
I think the paintover is an essential technique in the process, so that you can decide better about the textures, colors etc.
But how do you do this? I'm thinking on several ideas for the workflow:

1-Using photoshop over a simple and plain render from 3d max or whatever the modelling software?

2-Pass to the engine, for instance UDK, making basic texturing and lighting there, using GI and then paintover a screenshot in photoshop?

3-Doing the paintover in Zbrush so you can get a better conection between paintover and textures. That way you could take the textures from the paintover. The projection here should be very useful, but on the other hand you can't use layers like in Photoshop.


I'm thinking on the first one, but the others would be very useful for saving time of workflow, unfortunately quite tricky though, I believe..

Stromberg90

Well I don't think it matters what you use the paintover is just to get a feel where you are going with it, many things change after that.
And with option nr 3, you could do it in photoshop and then camera map the paintover to the geo in your 3D app.
I would not do that tough, cause I have a heard time seeing the paintover being used in the end result.

This is just my opinion, I am not a experienced environment maker, so there are many here that knows this better than me

tokidokizenzen

A paintover can and should be used at anytime in the pipe when one is needed. You don't always need to take the same approach. Take a screen shot from the most readily available medium that depicts the furthest along point in your production. For example; If all you have is a model in 3dMax, then use that. But if you've already integrated those models into UDK, then use a shot from UDK. And again, don't just do a paintover because that is what folks say is the next step. Do a paintover because you need one. You need to solve a problem, something in the scene is not right and you need a paintover to figure it out.

garko

Thank you both for the responses, I know what you mean, I should use paintovers more freely. It's just that I'm not a concept artist so I want to take the advantage of several things for speeding up the workflow and helping myself where I am not such skilled;

One thing is the GI, in my case I'm not a professional painter, so taking the lighting from the software would be an advantage for me, than having to imagine it.

Other thing is the textures, I think in this case zbrush is a very useful tool,so that you can do the texturing and the paintover at the same time, but I don't know if it is really used in production like that, due to some derivative issues.

On the other hand If I just take a plain render of the model I'd have more work to do.


Anyway, any tutorial about a complete workflow of designing an environment?