Hand-painted stone texture, bad tiling?

Zersixs · Mar 2014

Hi, I have made a tiling stone ground texture that looks like this (my first try)

when I add the texture in Unity3D it does not look that good when it tiles, I don't know how to make it better, if you check games like Heroes of the storm, their ground texture does not look so repeated as mine does, how do I achieve this effect? What am I doing wrong etc...

Please help, thank you!

S_ource · Mar 2014

The main reason is that you have bigger space on the edge of you texture then what you have in the middle.

Zersixs · Mar 2014

Yeah I see, thanks.

Steve Schulze · Mar 2014

Your best bet is to use the offset tool in Photoshop set to 50% of the size of your texture, 64*64 if your texture is 128*128 for example. This will move the outer edges of the texture into the middle, so it's easy to see where you've got seam problems.

Snader · Mar 2014

You only have 2² stones, while HOTS is around 10² or so:

(purple markings I drew in to show how big the texture is)

Plus, they have a shader that uses a greyscale map to blend between it and the dirt, causing the crevisces to fill up first instead of a simply blending the whole textures. And of course their version tiles a few times less, and has characters and buildings on top which also break things up.

While you can't recreate the ingame situation, you can quite easily make a texture with more rocks. So I suggest that be the first thing you do.

Fenyce · Mar 2014

Good start, but I'd also suggest to do 16 of your stones, you can simply archive this with tiling your texture 4 times. This way you can do a good amount of variation.

Zersixs · Mar 2014

Thanks for all the advice / information! I will have this in mind when I continue study!

moiman100 · Mar 2014

Krita is quite handy when it comes to handpainted tileable textures. There is mode where you can paint over the texture borders and it will continue on the other side of the texture. (wrap around mode)

.nL · Mar 2014

+1 for Krita. I've actually been making a push to have it replace photoshop in my workflows. It's absolutely free, and a great program.

Zersixs · Mar 2014

Yea Krita does look nice, perhaps I give it a try

Zersixs · Mar 2014

Hi, here is another stone texture I have been working on for like 20 mins, how can I improve it? I'm trying to get a look similare to Orcs must die, please point out errors etc... thank you!

(Tileable texture)

Fenyce · Mar 2014

First of I guess Orcs must die (didn't now that game until a minute ago, so I looked it up) is using normal maps. Someone correct me please if I'm wrong.
So their textures aren't simply painted.

That aside. Ways to improve that texture: Clean up the edges, they look kinda ghostly atm, because you used a soft brush. Add some details to the ground in the gaps. Your shapes are really nice, maybe you could add some edge highlights to the stones and some details in general. You should also think about color, hue and value variations.

Zersixs · Mar 2014

Hi Fenyce, thank you for the comment. It helps me alot and I shall continue practice!

Zersixs · Mar 2014

Hi, I tried to make a tree stump today and here are the result, took roughly 30 mins! how can I improve it and is it a good way to practice drawing random things like this?

unit187 · Mar 2014

I'd say look for photo references online and base your drawings on them.

JordanN · Mar 2014

There should be more texture. A tree stump usually has rings on the top and there are lots of protruding bark all around the sides. But more importantly, it needs more bark.

Also, what kind of perspective are you using? The bottom of the picture looks oddly flat. Think in terms of volume and apply proper shading to look more three dimensional. Right now, it looks like a pseudo-rectangle.

Finally, depending on your art style, you could add moss. It's not always necessary but it could make your tree more unique.

Zersixs · Mar 2014

Yeah, I have missed alot of stuff it seems. I wanna learn to draw textures like in Diablo 3. I gonna continue update this thread with my work!

Fenyce · Mar 2014

Take some photoreferences from cgtextures (or from somewhere else) and try to recreate the texture, Diablo3 has textures that are far less stylized as they are in WoW, so you should maybe take a look at photos and learn from those. Also do a refboard with diablo3 textures, so you can check it from time to time.

Zersixs · Mar 2014

Thanks for your advice, what is a refboard though?

Snafubar7 · Mar 2014

If you want to go nuts and improve drastically, I'll tell you what we did in my digital painting course where everyone improved drastically. One week we'd paint 6 different kinds of stone textures (granite, stone slabs, obsidian, etc --or even a couple the same kind), then the next week do 6 different kinds of wood textures (dead wood, polished wood, tree bark, warm tavern-like wood, etc). That's all we did all semester, each week 6 textures of different types of a material.

At that rate, you'll be a monster after a couple years.

Use photo reference for everything you do, try to really look at and understand what's going on in that material.

Keep your head up, it'll be a bumpy ride

more on what I'm talking about in this video from Ribtibs (plus, you can watch him practice the way I described here) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFhgmuM_u9M

Zersixs · Mar 2014

That is a great advice Snafubar7, thank you!

Zersixs · Mar 2014

Hi, I have a project to make a concept of a staff, this is mine. How can I improve it ? It is supposed to be made out of metal.

(This is not the finished version but I want feedback!)

Hand-painted stone texture, bad tiling?

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