Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2-Texture & Shaders!
Hi guys!
I'm Ana and I'm new posting around here so I would like to stop beeing a "voyeur" and show you some of my texture and shader stuff for Castlevania LOS2 I hope you like it ;-), please if you got any questions do not hesitate to ask!
Guido Sandzor
Bloody Warrior
Sculptures
Gorgon
Dracula Armoured Skin
Victor Belmont
ToyMaker Bridge
Thanks a lot!
http://www.anninsunderland.com/
I'm Ana and I'm new posting around here so I would like to stop beeing a "voyeur" and show you some of my texture and shader stuff for Castlevania LOS2 I hope you like it ;-), please if you got any questions do not hesitate to ask!
Guido Sandzor
Bloody Warrior
Sculptures
Gorgon
Dracula Armoured Skin
Victor Belmont
ToyMaker Bridge
Thanks a lot!
http://www.anninsunderland.com/
Replies
Great work Ana!
I only watched lords of shadow being played but it looked sick .
Care to share a bit about the texturing process? Pretty curious about how you guys kept a consistent look between so many artists.
I'm not the modeller of the statues, the credit in this particular case that i'm going to use as an example is for Guillermo Cuadrado , however I'm going to post that as an example to show you how many details are in the base mesh and how many are in the texture.;-)
Could you give some more insight into your texturing process ?
I'm particularly interested in how you achieve such crisp and nice cloth details.
And the bronze effect I saw on one of your statues on your website.
Especially Hazardous, I'm a very big fan of your work :-)
Minos, We used to work a pretty solid group of 6 or 7 texture artist team (even 8 in full production times) and we looked much about the work of others , so at the end is all very cohesive . We learned from each other and this ultimately is reflected in the final style and visuals.
The process "old way style" was started by baking AO in Max, corrected in photoshop to colored the black shadows, adding maps from crazy bump, max, photoshop used as masks, from there I went detailing supported by photography, different materials and textures... in my particular case in the Gorgon Forearm that I use as an example, I have a complete folder with animal photographies to use as texture itself or only as reference , same with the disgusting folder that contains all the skin, guts, blood, corpses... that I needed to make the Bloody Warrior XD all kind of nasty stuff
Arno I think this is the bronce you are asking me for? I can make something to show the cloth and bronce but in the meantime I can quick explain that process and it's very similar but in the bronce case I rely more in selection masks that we use to take from Max (a top bottom map for the dust, a corner to edge map with a plugin for the edges tears, and modify this masks with the photoshop filter gallery to make them more irregular and break the clean edges) but today with tools like the quixel suite, or even extracting this masks from Zbrush using Xnormal projections.. you can do that in a much more easily and efficient way though. (that's why I called that before the "old way style") ;-)
Were you responsible for any sculpting/unwrapping of the base mesh, or did you get to dig in once the high/low poly was done?
I appreciate your consideration of the texture work because people tend to "simplify" or undervalue the textures ...for me, some meshes wich are totally "a mess" or very poor in details(if you know what I mean) can improve thousand times with a very good texture or vice versa, If you have a really really nice model and you do a crappy texture work the final result is totally unworthy.
You ask me about the mapping workflow..
Personally I prefer to make the UVS myself using combined the Max tools and the UV Layout ,but when we worked at Castlevania LOS2 this task was not included in our functions, so we used to get a high poly model with its corresponding unwrapped low poly model from the modelers (with freedom to manipulate the UVS it if we thought that we could correct something or if we preferred to gave more resolution in some parts than in others t).We used this two meshes to obtain a several number of "projected masks" to turn them as a base to started with the photoshop layers working.
BUT ...in some cases they were unable to gave us the high poly version of the low poly(ohmygooodd running out of timeeeee , sorry guysss..)XD, then we have to use our "magical skills" to make the object look like a high mesh (using Zbrush, crazybump, fairy dust...whatever!)and creating more details by ourselves.
and finally we used to manipulate the normals they gave to us to added detail, to soften some areas or to make new things .
Hope that explains something :-)
As a character artist, I would love to see more info on the cloth and other character related textures such as skin and leather.
I think many people would be interested in seeing your texturing process from beginning to end in something like a video tutorial for example. I know I would.
"The old way style " as you called has something special regarding textures, all current textures are quite flat with PBR and all that.
I remember seeing the Alucard face texture made by one of your colleagues and being impressed with the subtle colour variation in the various areas of the face, is all of that just done by looking at reference or are there any special tricks involved ?
Cheers,
Arno
Sorry Arno is imposible for me right now make a video to explain the process, but I'll do my best to answer your questions if you have any texture concerns. Thanks a lot for the apreciation!