First Real Try at Hand Painting Textures
polycounter lvl 6
So I'm trying to kill one bird with two stones. I already had to intergrate 2 assets into Unity for school. One being a basic model with texture maps made elsewhere, while the other basic asset has to be textured within Unity. I decided to hand paint a very basic box staircase and duplicate 3 of them to make the start of a spiral. I don't have much experience trying this as all those masking techniques needed in PS have always eluded me. I decided to knuckle down and learn some techniques using a lot of masks-as well as presentation. The other asset I think I'll do is run off of this and do a tileable texture of the same type, and try blending them on a very small terain in engine. Let me know what ya'll think. Crits and comments are always thankful.
Thanks for lookin!
Thanks for lookin!
Replies
If you're wanting to get in some good hand painted practice I would suggest starting with things that are familiar like wood, stone, various metals, plants/leaves etc. that way people can identify with it and help you develop your paint skills! Looking forward to seeing some more
Do test to make sure it looks good in greyscale before adding color.
Think about which areas are getting more/less light than others (exposed edges versus sheltered nooks and crannies).
In terms of being stairs, and it looks like you have each step painted uniquely, you could paint in subtle horizontal AO where one step meets the next, and add edge highlights for each step.
I am definitely going to rework the growths, bevel the stones out more, and desaturate it all. Thanks for the tips and comments so far.
also, try to get the big shapes down before you spatter everything with details.
your sci-fi panels looks a lot better then the stairs though
Hand painting can be a slow process, sometimes there's no instantly gratifying part of it. You might think "oh my god this is terrible" for about an hour, then you walk away for a bit. You come back and it's "oh shit... not bad." That's a great feeling.
That floor panel texture (if I'm right on that) is a big improvement. keep going.
Anyhow, here is my first grab of the two floor pieces. I see now how to better model more pieces to be able to make the meandering hallways I'll need to complete this. This is just the diffuse maps for now and the middle intersection has a slight bevel on the outer corner pieces. By the way, the textures look pretty good from afar, but look blurry and not so good up close. I did tweak the import settings for the texture in Unity, but they still look pretty muddy up close. Could this be that I made 1024 textures and then scaled them to 512 when I dragged them onto the atlas I'm using?? Should I instead save a smaller version by resizing down in PS for a better result?
Screengrab:
So indeed. The strong highlights don't work for your floor, but they could be used fairly well for a wall. In general, pretending that there's just a giant light from the top will work well for some 'directional' lighting. Other than that you will have to work with AO, which means that things in crevisces or are recessed are darker and those 'in the open' or prodtruding are lighter.
Today I need to work on some particle effects (project req.) for the maze map which will consist of steam rising from some select floor grates. Also, I want to make a triggered particle effect for the doors when they open as the doors will be triggered to open/close. So I def. need to figure out the arch/door piece today as well.:\
Self-backpatting screenshot: