Hand Painting an Environment
polycounter lvl 9
UPDATE: 
Alright, so I needed a break from my Temple project for a bit and decided to do something hand painted and kind of stylized since it's something I haven't really done. The scene is going to be very simple and an arid environment. It'll be based around mining for gold. Any ideas for props or story/background are appreciated, but I want to keep the project manageable so I can finish it in a week or so and get back to the Temple.
Props will include:
Tent
Firewood
Shovel
PickAxe
Lantern
Rocks
Grass
Bucket
Gold
Pot
Packing Supplies
Maybe a wagon
Other suggestions?
My main question is about workflow. Since I'm doing this project primarily to focus on hand painting, what is the best workflow. Should I make high poly props and bake AO down and then paint, or just paint directly from the low poly props.
So far all I did was the ground to mess around a bit, and I just straight up painted a diffuse, spec and slight normal. I'm not really sure what the workflow is for people who strictly hand paint textures for stylized works like WoW and TF2 etc. so I'm asking you all because Polycounters know what's up.
Here is where I am at after messing around for a bit.. obviously a lot of work to do (I didn't even bother tiling the ground yet), but I didn't want to get in too deep before I knew the best way to go about it. Thanks everyone in advance!
Alright, so I needed a break from my Temple project for a bit and decided to do something hand painted and kind of stylized since it's something I haven't really done. The scene is going to be very simple and an arid environment. It'll be based around mining for gold. Any ideas for props or story/background are appreciated, but I want to keep the project manageable so I can finish it in a week or so and get back to the Temple.
Props will include:
Tent
Firewood
Shovel
PickAxe
Lantern
Rocks
Grass
Bucket
Gold
Pot
Packing Supplies
Maybe a wagon
Other suggestions?
My main question is about workflow. Since I'm doing this project primarily to focus on hand painting, what is the best workflow. Should I make high poly props and bake AO down and then paint, or just paint directly from the low poly props.
So far all I did was the ground to mess around a bit, and I just straight up painted a diffuse, spec and slight normal. I'm not really sure what the workflow is for people who strictly hand paint textures for stylized works like WoW and TF2 etc. so I'm asking you all because Polycounters know what's up.
Here is where I am at after messing around for a bit.. obviously a lot of work to do (I didn't even bother tiling the ground yet), but I didn't want to get in too deep before I knew the best way to go about it. Thanks everyone in advance!
Replies
I'm trying to do the same thing, hand painted environment in modern day 3d. I started out by flushing out the organic shapes first, the objects you can model very fast and just throw a simple unwrap on and put a tileable texture on. This builds up the environment and color scheme very fast! I'd worry about the man-made stuff later, it takes a lot longer to make these props. Build up the terrain, skybox, rocks, all that first, they make up easily 60% of the scene. By pushing simple objects with simple UV's you can develope a style without having to worry about going back and messing with complicated textures and UV's that take lots of minute detailing. I'd highly recomend you start putting this in UDk so you can start developing some cool materials and effects that are unique to this project, one of the things that sets "hand painted" stuff apart is the material nodes, and the options you have in UDK are far more versatile than in a standard 3d program like max or maya. I've been finding that very simple diffuses paired with well thought out normals is the way to go, that and a good lighting setup. In this day and age you can throw more and more polygons at stuff but the texture memory is still an issue, so highly detailed meshes with tiled texturing makes a lot of sense.
Hope this helps, i'll keep an eye on this and if you have any UDK questions just let me know! Get this stuff in engine man, way more fun working on stuff that's in real time than stuff you gotta render out every time you gotta see it
I'll start building this in UDK too, that's always a problem I have in that I start modeling and texturing everything in Maya and then when it's time to transfer everything to UDK it takes forever and I have to switch all the normals values so they don't get inverted. Pretty big waste of time and one of the reasons I'm taking a break on my temple scene lol.
I'll start with generic environment objects like you said. Good call on that. Updates to come (later today).
It took my a while to learn a lot of udk like vertex painting, getting rid of seams on mirrored objects, foilage etc.
I have a few problems. The first picture is what the map looks like in lit-mode. A little over the top on contrast but more of what I had in mind for the piece, afterall it's a low-poly handpainted one.
The second is the game-render view of an accurate representation of it as a map. The colors and contrast go to hell quite a bit, not sure why.
Lastly, my foilage (alpha planes with a diffuse/opacity) are extremely dark on one side of the plane and not on the other... not sure why. Also the planes are clipping through the terrain a bit so it's showing about 3/4ths the foilage and 1/4th is below ground. Anyone know how to fix this?
Next I'll do the sky, not sure how to go about that yet... and start adding more foilage/pebbles/rock structures. Then I'll go in and add some props.