Hand painted in less time?
Hello there! I was recently brought onto an animation team to work on textures for an old, degrading palace. The style is pretty hand painted, which I enjoy (although I don't have much experience with.) The problem is the time constraint- I only seem to achieve that painterly look if I spend a second 5ish hour pass to smooth everything out, but I can't really spend that time due to an approaching deadline.
I can get something like this down in about 30 minutes (just a test, non-tileable,)
...but I estimate another 2 hours smoothing that out. Does anyone know any tricks or better approaches to the hand painted workflow? I've got layers and masks set up so I focus on grayscale to begin, then color real quick. That's my current approach. Thoughts?
I can get something like this down in about 30 minutes (just a test, non-tileable,)
...but I estimate another 2 hours smoothing that out. Does anyone know any tricks or better approaches to the hand painted workflow? I've got layers and masks set up so I focus on grayscale to begin, then color real quick. That's my current approach. Thoughts?
Replies
As for tricks, I just paint to get my shapes and tones, then go back and do details with proper lighting. My textures hardly break 512x512.
As far as I heard, its better for antialiasing if you scale it in half at the end.
Same things that applies to regular painting applies here as well. Start big, go small, from general to specific. Sounds like you're trying to do equal polish over the entire surface which you wouldn't do in a painting where the focal points would get more polish than the rest. This is good to think about. Have in mind what's the focal elements(details, crevices, anything related to structure to name a few) and what's just inbetween's(like blank walls and other transitional areas). Put more work in the focal elements. The rest just needs to look right enough. Meticulously rendering exactly everything will produce noise anyway.
Also there's nothing wrong with doing line sketches before starting the actual painting.
Depends on target output. Mobile/3DS I paint 1:1 because sometimes I may not have access to filtering.
I used to think that stuff like bevel can't produce good results but it's only the case if you completely rely on it and don't paint over it. Or if you leave all the default settings rather than tweaking them to your liking.
I'd recommend it for stuff like pavement, tiles or bricks but with certain brushes it can also help you making soft terrain deformations.
Outer glow or drop shadow can be useful whenever there's a need to create a feeling of depth or make something stick out more.
Also, I try to paint stuff like pebbles, branches, flowers or leaves on separate layer, and then I put them in a PS document for possible use in future.
Clone stamp and healing brush obviously can be really useful for creating variations, even though their usage kinda goes against the "from general to specific" rule that Aimbiz mentioned.
Important thing to remember is that clone stamp can create differences in sharpness level, which leads to artifacts if you use sharpening filters later.
Btw, does this texture really contain just two bricks? or is it just a fragment of a larger pic?
@AimBiz: Really helpful stuff! Since I'm not working on one layer, I can't really see the whole thing until much further in the process, and something I'm rendering out now might be underneath moss or something by the end, which is pretty useless. I'll definitely do more sketching first.
@ Lamont and Blaisoid: the pic is just a test to get my color pallet and workflow down. I'll post the big one I started last night below.
@ Blaisoid: thanks for the tool ideas. Gonna try it all out. I dig what you said about saving foliage separately.
So here's about 2 hours in (before I saw all your replies unfortunately,) a while spent sketching / smoothing out black masks, then beginning to do a pass on the rocks with a hard circle brush at 100 percent opacity and 7 percent flow. Each rock takes about 3 minutes right now to get it to about where you see. And yes, I was planning on this being 2048x2048, thus the 4096 right now. It isn't really going to be the focus of any shots, though, so I'm re-thinking. Perhaps I can get away with 1024, since I have so many uv layers to work with, and the UVs make good use of space. Thoughts on that?