Gothic Cathedral (First attempt at hand painting textures)
polycounter lvl 10
Hey everyone. I've been chipping away at this project steadily for the past 2.5 months or so in my spare time. A bit of background info: My main goal of this scene is to more or less nail that "Diablo" feel, especially Diablo 2, with a bit of the texture saturation qualities found in Diablo 3.
This is my first attempt at constructing an entire scene with hand painted textures without any use of photo sources, so it was quite a change in what I was used to, and turned out to be quite a learning experience too. I'm not quite finished with this project yet, as there's still a bit I want to put into the textures and other things that may need to be changed and improved.
The scene, as it is now is just under 31,000 triangles. Everything is diffuse only (64x64 to 512x512), with exception of the treasure chest, which has a simple spec map at the moment, but I may remove that and paint in the specular highlights manually. There are also glow maps for the light rays and candles.
This is still a WIP, and any feedback regarding any aspect of the project would be greatly apreciated.
Renders:
Wireframe Shot:
Texture Sheets: Here are just a few of the textures.
This is my first attempt at constructing an entire scene with hand painted textures without any use of photo sources, so it was quite a change in what I was used to, and turned out to be quite a learning experience too. I'm not quite finished with this project yet, as there's still a bit I want to put into the textures and other things that may need to be changed and improved.
The scene, as it is now is just under 31,000 triangles. Everything is diffuse only (64x64 to 512x512), with exception of the treasure chest, which has a simple spec map at the moment, but I may remove that and paint in the specular highlights manually. There are also glow maps for the light rays and candles.
This is still a WIP, and any feedback regarding any aspect of the project would be greatly apreciated.
Renders:
Wireframe Shot:
Texture Sheets: Here are just a few of the textures.
Replies
Same for the portal effect texture, maybe put some dark darks in there, some swirly bits or something.
Also, you might get a red glow around the portal?
I'd like to know how you did your lighting / render set up because I am horrible at lighting, and I'd like to do a hand-painted Blizzard style piece eventually.
It would also look good if you made some of the rocks around it more effected by the glow.
Looks amazing though, for your first attempt at hand painted i'd say spot on!
The only thing that is standing out to me is the treasure chest, it doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the room yet, maybe dirty it up or desaturate it a little bit. I think it's just missing the tlc you gave the other textures.
I would suggest creating a "path of light" along the center of the room, to help the eye make sense of the room a little more. The outer areas can still be as dark as they are now but having a central carpet path more clearly lit would help the presentation i think. Right now i just find my eye gets lost in the image, it jumps from light to light without taking time to understand how they interconnect.
ps: i disagree about the treasure chests. In a game you want your loot to stand out a little so the player doesn't pass them by.
Don't mind my crits though- your best texture is the one you use for the wall and the floor, it has color variations so it is not monotone and also nice, balanced contrast.
Do the same to the rest of your textures. I also noticed you are using blurry brushes, be confident and create some nice hard lines!
Good luck and I like seeing more people get into hand painted, it is my favorite :P
Keep it coming!!!
question: are you using basic lighting at this point or are you vertex lighting it at the moment?
Either way looking incredible and looking forward to more!
(if you paint some more stones do a little vid of it , I always love to see peoples approaches to hand painted stuff
lighting needs another pass, more pools of light in the middle and better contrast, maybe up the strength of those lightrays and make up streaky, also that lava (?) texture deffinatly needs another pass
but really nice scene
it'd be really nice if you could get that in the wood texture as well. it's got a very monochromatic dodge/burned look right now and feels neglected, comparatively.
@andersh: Thanks for the suggestions. Yeah, I'll definitely be giving the wood texture some more love. For the lighting, I basically made use of volume lights because they seem to give me much more control as opposed to using the standard point light in Maya. The volume light gives me a similar amount of control to the point light you'd find in Unreal, so it worked out pretty well, especially for things like pockets of candlelight. Beyond that, I usually have an ambient light with a very low intensity and a hue, in this case, an ominous blue.
@wester: Great idea, I had a feeling the lava seemed to be missing some of that "pop". The portal and lava currently don't have any glow maps on them, so I'll go ahead and play with the glow and diffuse a bit more.
@mLink: Thanks, The treasure chest is definitely something I want to work on more. But Art Machine also brought up a good point about having it stand out... hmm. Also, what does tlc mean?
@Art-Machine: The path of light idea is very, very interesting. I actually thought of that for a little bit but then proceeded to dismiss it. But since you mentioned it, I think I will experiment with that a bit.
@Mazvix: Good point about using hard brushes. I found that I used mostly soft brushes when I made the first few textures for some reason. I guess it is a confidence thing, lol. I'll keep this in mind from now on. Also, I can see why this is your favorite style, you have some awesome stuff. I especially like your Mushroom Town =D
@seforin: Thanks dude. I did not use any vertex lighting, it is basic lightmapping at this point. I would love to do a video at some point, but I think I want to get a bit more experience in this style before I do so.
@Minotair0: Aghh... The lighting was something I tweaked, and continue to tweak endlessly. I will keep this in mind and play around with the ambient lighting a bit, but I don't want to make it too bright.
@Sectaurs: Thanks for pointing that out. I will try to give it more love.
Agree with sharpening some of the textures up, will really help the details pop out.
My main gripe is the portal though. You've got nice detail in the textures and geometry in the rest of the scene, but the portal looks a bit simple, which is bringing the whole scene down because the portal's the main focus. Jazz up the horns somehow and make the portal a bit less "blurry" and this will be a great scene all around
And as others have said the walls look awesome.
Oh, and if you added a big arse chandelier, that would be kick ass.
Just my two cents, though - great work!