Hand Painted texture skills
polycounter lvl 18
I wanted to have a discussion about hand painted textures. Amazingly, they still seem to be in high demand but now with everyone focusing on high poly "next gen" (well, current gen) artwork there is a lack of people with the skills to do it.
I'm suggesting for any hopefuls who are looking to get into the industry: get some hand painted stuff in your portfolio.
but maybe I'm just super lucky or my Charisma of 18 helps me get work, so share some of your thoughts.
I'm suggesting for any hopefuls who are looking to get into the industry: get some hand painted stuff in your portfolio.
but maybe I'm just super lucky or my Charisma of 18 helps me get work, so share some of your thoughts.
Replies
Congrats on getting a job, very inspiring to hear that. It's very intimidating seeing how everything is heading towards super realism.
Also, I saw that Warhammer prop on your page. Did you work on the game or is that a fan piece? Either way, it's awesome!
And...not to derail/spam the thread, but it would be cool if you could give me pointers on the hand painted environment I'm doing > http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=98076&page=4
Seeing as you've broken into the industry with hand painted, any secrets you could share?
Funny that painting seems to becoming a lost art
I'm sure there's ways to get the same hand-painted nostalgic feel, with a high res model, but this may just be me? I think what i'm trying to convey is that there's a lack of experimentation when it comes to hand-painted techniques, and it's also super redundant calling it hand painted. i mean every map i do is hand painted!? (except for like cavity maps and what not)
Snowfly: MMO's man! Blizzard looks to be hiring all levels of character artist for WoW and like Rhinokey mentioned, Kingsisle is hiring too. Tencent Boston, 38, Carbine, and Trion all look for good painting skills as well.
Alberto: everyone knows what we mean when we say "hand painted" :-P
@Rhinokey, thanks for the link. I am going to bookmark that and spam you guys with my stuff once I graduate.
Hand painted sculpt....eh...I dunno. Definitely worth the experimentation, but I honestly think it would look muddy. I tried a very basic normal map on a brick texture I did, and when I looked at it, all the painting I did seemed to be drowned out by the normal map. However, that was just a very stupid quick one.
In one of Jessica Dinh's threads, she used a normal map on a hand painted texture, and it looked freaking awesome. Only downside is it took forever to hand paint the normals
Justin your texturing skills are sick man
Unchartered, Last of Us, Max Payne 3, and Brink
all incredibly beautiful games that have all their textures handpainted. It might not be toony but the skill to paint everything properly should be style-flexible.
Also Facebook/iOS games tend to use this style as well. People forget about those type of games. Just cause it's not AAA Console/PC doesn't mean it's not a game! Some of those hand painted games look awesome.
Glad I did my art training the way I did.
It will be interesting to see how Hand Painted stuff stacks up in ten or twenty years. Will it continue to evolve or stagnate into a number of recognizable styles (i.e: WoW)
Just to try and answer your question, it's because assets created in the MMO-type of hand-painted stuff are diffuse-heavy. Meaning, the asset and the artist relies on the diffuse map to convey what the material is.
The assets you're talking about, like those that Naughty Dog does, rely on the shader to convey what the material is. Which would include several maps, including some of the more exotic ones, and where the diffuse texture plays only a small role.
Since I don't know the workflow to create textures at Naughty Dog (I would love for someone from there to talk about it btw), I have to guess that they're using manual methods, "hand-painting", to produce textures that are as good or better than photo-sourcing.
Not that there's anything wrong with any of those approaches. I just believe that's where the difference in definition comes from. When most people say "hand-painted" they mean the MMO-type, even though other games technically do paint their textures by hand, because that's where painting is the most visible. They paint the lightsource in and all that.
Like skylebones said- 'keep your portfolio filled with the type of work you want to do at a job'
And like Del pointed out- not all hand painted textures have to be games like WoW, Kingsisle games, etc
I don't know, it really all depends on YOU and what YOU want to do. I love hand painting textures, but I also love sculpting just as much (on top of wanting to stay current-gen). There definitely aren't many companys around that do this and I recently had to struggle quite a bit looking for a position where I could still do both.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I hand paint all the stuff I do and I really can't think of a better way to do it. Hand painted stuff gives you complete control over your textures, so they don't have weird shadows and color balance.
Granted, I also bake out tons and tons of maps to use as the basis for masks and selection layers when I make textures, so I suppose that helps. I really just don't understand how people can use straight photos when they do anything having to do with texturing. Especially when making characters. Shit's ugly, dude.
Handpainting skills comes into play at all levels, even when doing realistic stuff and utilizing photo-sourcing. It helps you manipulate the image way better, or paint things in that weren't there to begin with.
Not having those skills will just end up with the artist going "I have this thing I want to make but there's no photo for it"
It's a lack of information, coupled with getting used to certain techniques.
As for me personally, I have an understanding of hand-painting most materials in the MMOesque cartoony variety. Skin, metal, wood, cloth, etc. But creating realistic textures manually has always eluded me. After watching Racer's tutorials and the Mashru Mishu Street Cop tutorial I understand better the process of manually creating textures like that for current-gen photo-real normal-mapped assets.
Though it seems that with that workflow it's more like using Photoshop's tools to create a texture, not so much painting it in the traditional sense.
Then for skin there's the old Michael Knowland tutorial which I still find very effective. And I was never able to achieve a similar result without photo-sourcing. Of course that's not to say that it's not possible. Just that I'm ignorant as to how to do that.
As far as hand-painting stylized textures on top of sculpted assets, again there's a serious lack of resources. For instance, I was totally psyched for the Vigil Nights videos when they sculpted the sword. I really wanted to finally see someone paint the textures for such an asset. But the videos stopped after the sculpting. Same exact thing for the Gnomon DVD by Vitaly Bulgarov. It says he will cover texturing in the second DVD, but that never came out.
So yeah... I think there's a serious lack of resources on the subject. Seems like everyone stops at sculpting, and there's very little documentation about the texturing part.
luckily, painting has been around for about 32,000 years, so... You just need to broaden your scope, you'll learn how.
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I tried to revive this one! http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=41931&page=9 more of you guys with mad skills need to bump the old ones.
That's not what I meant. There's a difference between painting with oil on canvas and using Spotlight in zBrush to project textures.
It's a question of workflow, not of theory.
Yeah, same here. You can paint in lots and lots of details but it's gonna take longer if the map is huge and you really need to do the details right.
I prefer doing a mix of both, I paint the map and merge in photos for the details and such. I could paint that too but it would just take so much longer. On my hand-painted lowpoly characters however I usually don't use photos but if I do it's mainly for the shapes and what not so I paint over them in the end.
lol it should definitely be called Unchartered.
I agree with BigJohn. When we refer to handpainted, we refer to the style that represents a lot of the finished look (bar some lighting) in the finished diffuse map. Basically like having a bitchin' (hopefully) digital painting projected onto a mesh. Maybe it's not the best term for it, but I can't see any other term replacing it.
Or it actually is.
Materials can change things around a bit, but when it comes to the knowledge of shape and lighting, which are essential to it, the rest are just tiny technical details.
These skills essentially rely on your ability to give shape to what is in your head, you'll have the ability to know how a form would look on paper, and how it will be lit with different materials, after that it'll transfer to any medium and any program with ease.
Very often, but you'll also see someones handpainting skills put to use on high end next-gen models as well, and that could be in combination with an ao bake and a few photos overlays.
Actually: more often than not; people with strong traditional skills will produce a better result of a texture when it comes to shader-heavy assets.
This!
Yeah, we know that 'current-gen' textures are often handpainted. My point was it may be a slightly innacurate term, but it's here to stay, and I was just specifying the particular style of texture painting that it refers to.
So yeah, painted textures can have alot of meaning in this day and age, you're not limited to cartoony textures for be scratch made.
Manually constructing something like skin in Photoshop will obviously give you more control over just projecting some 3dsk textures. But it's also a more complicated process, that (as far as I can tell) has very little to do with traditional painting. And it's not very well-documented at all, as opposed to the texture-projection methods and the MMO-esque diffuse-only texture painting (which has more in common with traditional painting).
My point is just that there's a lack of documentation about that method, that's why you see it referred to less. I'd love it if one of the Naughty Dog guys could record themselves making a skin texture (or pants, or leather, or anything) and put it online. I think many of us would learn a lot from it.
Come to think of it, I wonder if we won't see some of that in Food for the Eye.
Lets face it most next gen stuff tends to be process led,with a separation of specualar/diffuse. gone are the days where you just painted everything in , including the fake lighting.( unless you are doing more cartoony old skool stuff)
I personally tend to do a hand painted base layer then overlay photos on top. its really hard to do a pure photo source texture that does n't look a bit dirty.
For skin particularly I use less AO overlays, but tend to use more for cloth and other mechancial stuff
another issue is size, who wants to hand paint a 2048x 2048 from scratch. i tend to start at 512 and then size up, adding the photo stuff later
When it comes down to it though, I do whatever the art director wants or I don't get paid:)
im going to say something that might get a few peoples backs up here:
"you cant achieve the same natural look with a handpainted texture as you can with a photo"
now its a stupid thing to say as its very dependent on the artists ability in either field
BUT real things contain an infinite amount of info gained from existing in the world for a length of time... handpainted stuff has what the artist comes up with and the random/talented imperfections that come from painting...each method (done correctly IMO) comes from a different end of the scale, handpainting requires more and more time to add imperfections etc to look really natural, photographs require alot of time (or decent capture techniques) to remove lighting make tile/ and you still need to produce a normal map etc in most cases as the styles going to be realism.
most artists i know use a composite of the two depending on several factors
- is it a real thing/do you have reference
- how natural is it (will it take longer to paint lighting out or handpaint lots of natural detail in)
- what fidelity is needed for final product
The type of texturing that requires you to have drawing/painting skills, there was a recent thread were a lot of people expressed the opinion that drawing wasn't a fundamental skill. I have my doubts that those people could reproduce the work seen in games like Diablo 3 or the beautiful art in Allods Online.
I really haven't ever perceived, from the outside, a lot of job postings like that. Kings isle sounds like heaven, but aside from them and some intense korean studios I haven't really noticed too much texture painting work floating around. If I did, i'd have put together a 3d portfolio by now!
One of those was me. But the context was different. There it was about practicing your 2D, say drawing, to indirectly improve your 3D, say zBrush sculpting. Which I think doesn't necessarily apply. I know it doesn't for me, so I don't consider it a fundamental skill.
But the context here is painting, color and material. So of course traditional painting and drawing will help you a lot there. Which is why I'm practicing it now and am curious about all these different workflows.
I basically just avoid any job descriptions that mention zbrush or normal maps.
Agreed
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