Confusion with hand painted textures.
polycounter lvl 5
Despite being able to model things and layout UV's I've never actually tried to paint my own textures before as I'm not really that artistic. Anyway, I've watched a bunch of tutorials and managed to get a sense of the workflow.
But the part that has me confused is how do you determine where to paint your light information? Let's say I'm developing for a mobile game and plan on not using lights in the game. I am strictly modeling and only have low poly models. In this case, it will be less complicated as I can just decide on the 'direction of the light in-game' and keep it consistent throughout my textures.
But what about if I have lights in my game, then how do I determine where to paint the light information? Would baking out an AO map in my 3d package using a physically accurate light system be the best way to help solve this problem? But then if my models are low poly would it really help much?
Hopefully, this makes sense and someone can clarify my confusion. I have watched tutorials about hand painting textures but this still confuses me.
Cheers!
But the part that has me confused is how do you determine where to paint your light information? Let's say I'm developing for a mobile game and plan on not using lights in the game. I am strictly modeling and only have low poly models. In this case, it will be less complicated as I can just decide on the 'direction of the light in-game' and keep it consistent throughout my textures.
But what about if I have lights in my game, then how do I determine where to paint the light information? Would baking out an AO map in my 3d package using a physically accurate light system be the best way to help solve this problem? But then if my models are low poly would it really help much?
Hopefully, this makes sense and someone can clarify my confusion. I have watched tutorials about hand painting textures but this still confuses me.
Cheers!
Replies
In my opinion and my relatively little experience (including watching people's work), I found that AO map does help giving the model its 'light dimension'. Baking AO map from high poly and apply it on low poly does gives the model its details and add a touch of realism to it, but I don't think it's really enough to give a light information for a low poly model.
However! It does give a general idea of where the shadow is and you can work from there. In painting program, create a base color than paste a layer of AO map over it in Multiply mode, and you can work from there, painting more intensity into shadow or highlight.
If you choose to forgo AO map altogether, IMO the rule of thumb is that the light usually comes from above and you can estimate where the shadow/highlight on your model will be by comparing the position of that UV part to where the 'light from above' would hit.
Hope it's not too confusing!
EDIT: I dug up a model for a scrapped game project I worked on
As you can see, I baked a (admittedly rushed) AO map, which I then put it as a multiply layer over a flat color texture. I could found only a flattened image of the texture but I hope it can give you the idea.
If I am to continue working on the texture I at least have a general idea of where the shadow/light is. So I'd say baking AO map can help.
This one was made without AO map. I hand painted it in ZBrush which provides a slight blessing of giving me the default light, which gives me a general idea of where should I put the contour on.
(In hindsight, I admit that I should put more work on it though.
I hope this can help you maybe a little bit on your hand-painting-texture journey. Good luck and have fun!
Handpainting assets is more or less just learning how to paint well. If you learn how to paint, you'll learn how to handpaint 3D models.
Kassyndra your example helps demo the use of an AO perfectly, clearly the more detail the model has the more useful it will be. But even without detail it can still inform me of plan changes on a model.
Thanks again!