Technical specs for toon/fantasy assets
polycounter lvl 8
Hi guys,
I'm doing a toonish fantasy piece for my portfolio like WoW (I'm tired of WoW textures that's just an example), basically as an excuse to demonstrate to employers the ability to do hand painted assets. I feel I should go the low poly route, and just have a diffuse/spec.
In my planning stage, I've come up with quite a few questions that I really need help answering:
I'm doing a toonish fantasy piece for my portfolio like WoW (I'm tired of WoW textures that's just an example), basically as an excuse to demonstrate to employers the ability to do hand painted assets. I feel I should go the low poly route, and just have a diffuse/spec.
In my planning stage, I've come up with quite a few questions that I really need help answering:
- Whenever stylized texture work like this are done, is it better to keep it low poly? And by better, I mean will this impress employers more.
- Should hand painted textures ever be used with a normal map, or should I avoid using one?
- And lastly, if I go low poly, and target it at say a Wii platform, am I best to viewport render something such as this, or would it still be fine to put it into UDK (only engine I'm familiar with)? I feel a next-gen engine may just contradict the point of it being a piece for a lower end platform.
Replies
In terms of whether it'll impress employers, I can't really comment as I'm not employed, but one thing to bear in mind is that when hand-painting textures, you have to sell all aspects like depth and surface texture without the use of a normal map. From my experience, making a brick wall look like a brick wall through the use of stylized textures will require a different workflow to doing so by baking a high poly and texturing based off of that. However, I'm not sure whether one would be seen as 'more impressive' than the other as they are skills unique to each other and again workflows that would be called upon dependent on the project at hand.
2. Again, depends on the project. I've used normal maps with hand painted textures, check out my Ramen Shop env in my portfolio, and also check out shots of the game 'Naruto Rise of a Ninja' where they used hand painted textures with a toon look along with normal maps. There's no firm 'should I or shouldn't I' because again it will depend on the game. As I mentioned, the painterly style is often closely associated with games that use low poly assets or on hardware that doesn't utilize normal mapping.
3. Check out the Low Poly thread in P&P, there's some tips on displaying low-poly work. It depends though whether you are going 'old-school' low poly, or simply stylized aesthetic for current gen. UDK does stylized stuff nicely, again take a look at my Ramen Shop, and also Borderlands was built on UnrealEngine.
Hope that helps a bit, as I said, I'm not in a position to offer advice from a proffessionals point of view but in my experience, the above is what I have concluded.
EDIT: If you have WoW installed on your computer, check out the WoW model viewer which will allow you to export out objects and their textures so you can check out how they're made.
I believe this assumption is true because giving a low poly model a great and stylish look using only hand painted texture is something that show without "cheatin" your pure art abilities
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=51622
Link to my site is in my sig, don't get too excited though lol it's not that good but it does show how hand painted textures look in UDK.
Please do, the inner workings of Japanese games industry has always been a mystery to me. Needless to say, language is a huge barrier, but it's also the fact that Japanese developers rarely post on english speaking boards. I would love to see some light being shed on their techniques; I grew up playing both Japanese and western games and I would hate to limit myself only to one side of the coin.
That would be amazing to see Lamont, be great if you could show us, thanks!