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Hand-painted Wells

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  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Thanks jimmypopall!

    I'm glad you're enjoying my thread bbob, and thank you lots for your advice on style vs. technicality; I will keep it in mind :)

    As for progresss, I know it's been awhile since I've updated due to drama with curriculum at school . . . sometimes makes me want to drop out -__- But anyway! Here is a tree. Planning to create a color variant of it, either bluer or yellower, not sure, and also a cypress sapling:

    500 tris. This tree is on a 1024 x 1024, but only half of the map is shown here since the other half is currently empty, as I am planning to fill it with other things.

    cypshotpcount.jpg

    Uploaded with ImageShack.us

    The body of the tree here is split in 4 256 x 256 sections, of which the center two are tileable for extending the length of the mesh. The body is also tileable horizontally - thus the tree is mirrored in half with no seams. That little section of tree on the right side of the map is for the alpha cards sticking out of the tree.

    cypress01offsettestpcou.jpg

    Uploaded with ImageShack.us

    Critique and comments welcome,
    Thanks! Jessica
  • Jeff Parrott
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    Jeff Parrott polycounter lvl 19
    Looking awesome Jessica! I keep checking hoping there's some updates to this thread.

    Keep on painting loose like this. It's working great. Push some warm color to balance out the cool blues, etc. Could be the spots just brighter.

    Also the lighting on your 3d model is killing the whole thing. Get a better lighting set up please. The model looks solid and the texture is awesome. But with the lighting on the right picture it's hurting it bad.
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Haha yeahh, I suck at lighting - but that is actually just the UDK mesh viewport, I hadn't set up any lights. And I will look into pushing the warms. Thanks Jeff! ^_^
  • Gannon
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    Gannon interpolator
    Love the style and great Tutorial on the rocks, I've been looking for a method that could reduce the time it takes to make something like that. I'll have to try it out later.

    Again, great stuff.
  • Jeff Parrott
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    Jeff Parrott polycounter lvl 19
    Place the static in a scene and make a simple 3 point lighting set up maybe. Just invert a sphere, scale it large, export it and put a simple dark grey material on it. Placing your static in that type of environment will showcase it much better.
  • Baddcog
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    Baddcog polycounter lvl 9
    Too much style, tone it down a bit would ya? Jeeze, making us look bad ;)

    Looks like you got the tiling aspects down pretty well now too.
  • Mcejn
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    Mcejn polycounter lvl 12
    Really good progress, great to see. Now get back to work! :\
  • jeremiah_bigley
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    jeremiah_bigley polycounter lvl 12
    Love your handpainted textures Jessica! Really awesome work! Can't wait to see the entire scene start coming together!
  • octokitty
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    octokitty polycounter lvl 14
    Wow, I really like that tree texture!!
  • snake85027
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    snake85027 polycounter lvl 18
    awesome work, what brushes do you usually use? I have a problem of my painted textures looking to blurry and muddy.
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Thanks guys!

    Jeffro - Ok, I will attempt that lighting setup for my next post. So basically I put my mesh and lights in a scene contained within a sphere? Or am I misunderstanding completely? haha

    Baddcog, thanks to you and a couple others, I'm totally starting to get the hang of the tiling stuff now :):) I can't believe how utterly lost I was before lol!

    Mcejn - I'm working mannn

    jeremiah_bigley - I can't wait either haha

    octokitty - And I really like your creepy asian twins.

    snake85027 - I am just using a hard round brush with pen pressure/transfer on. But to clean up edges (the blurriness, muddiness) I go back in with a tiny %100 hard round brush in some places. To top it all off, Smart Sharpen (it's like my favorite thing ever). However, my stuff always looks blurry and muddy when I am first starting out, so maybe it is just a matter of you needing to put a little more time in - and it will look great :)
  • Tadao215
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    Tadao215 polycounter lvl 13
    nice textures and lots of good info on this one!
  • Jeff Parrott
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    Jeff Parrott polycounter lvl 19
    Yeah you can do that or just use a plane. The sphere is just easy and it looks nice. Just make sure the normals are flipped on it. Apply a simple shader to it. Then just add some lights that show off the asset well.
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Thanks Tadao215 :)

    Will do jeffro! Thank you
  • Lucas Annunziata
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    Lucas Annunziata polycounter lvl 13
    Thats a really cool idea to have the center two sections of the tree tileable. Seeing your progress and other's feedback has been really helpful. Keep at it!
  • Delko
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    Delko polycounter lvl 15
    Dont know how I' missed this thread for so long, all these textures are amazing. The pebbles one is especially awesome.
  • Robbyh
    this is seriously the best thread out there for game texturing to.. like i learned alot from ur workflow and so on
    i started painting my own ones after alot of different threads + this !

    Thankyou !
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Thanks guys :)

    Here's a small update while I continue working on my terrain sculpting and corkwood tree texture. Fixed the terrain tileables!

    Still not as good as merecraft's paintover I think, haha, but still a lot better thanks to him! :D

    crackedcliff_edit.gif

    Added more depth and defined the blades:

    grass_edit.gif

    Moarrr sand:

    sand_edit.gif

    Diminished the cartoony outline around the pebbles:

    pebbles_edit.gif

    Also, here is a little sample of how they interact with each other, done up in photoshop. I ain't showing you guys my ugly terrain yet :/ (although I have tested my textures on it myself and found there is no noticeable banding :D). Soon, soon, I will have a scene to show, and not just a bunch of random textures haha!

    combotest_pcount.jpg

    Critique and comments welcome,
    Thanks! Jessica
  • BrontoThunder
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    BrontoThunder polycounter lvl 13
    Whoa, excellent update on those textures especially the stone one.

    All of these textures are brilliant, actually - I think it would be cool to see them applied to more things like that tree.
  • Ghostscape
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    Ghostscape polycounter lvl 13
    This project is looking awesome, you are kicking ass. I will say though, watch your relative scales - your grass, pebbles, sand+pebbles, and rock all seem to be in different scales - shouldn't the lake pebbles be closer in size, on average, the the pebbles on the sand? If this isn't mowed grass, shouldn't those blades of grass be 6-7 inches long? Which would make the pebbles huge? etc.
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Thanks BrontoThunder! I will be applying these to the terrain and posted here, after I sculpt it out a bit more.

    Ghostscape - I guess I should have been thinking about scale when I painted that little test, but in UDK I can change the scale of each of the textures pretty easily. Then I will be able to shrink the pebbles to match the sand better, make the grass bigger, etc. I also plan on making actual grass meshes as well as other types of ground cover. So overall I think I will be dealing with most of my scaling issues once I get into UDK :) Thank you for the crit!
  • alloa
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    alloa polycounter lvl 12
    I like your 2d skills! you have so much good illustrations on your site! :thumbup:
    This scene looks very nice!
    I will follow this thread. :)
  • Clark Coots
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    Clark Coots polycounter lvl 12
    bravo excellent!
  • kelli
    Cool painted textures! The tree is great. I think it could use a little bit more warmth to it in the lighter areas, kind of like how you have it in the grass.
  • linkov
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    linkov polycounter lvl 10
    Looking good, but grass is kinda weird. It reminds me of traditional oil paintings :) It works, but I think you can do even better. Here is some pictures, these are NOT MINE! though they might help.

    33.jpg

    34.jpg

    they are from here: http://shurick.livejournal.com/195876.html

    its a big article, regarding environment art direction for Allods Online. Quite interesting read, but sadly, only in russian. Some pictures are self explanatory, and I guess google translator can make some sense of it.
  • Robbyh
    the blog journal post was realy interesting ! if u google translate it that is !
  • Helba
    Nice link linkov, and great work here!
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Thank you alloa - your work is realllly inspirational to me.

    coots7 - :D

    kelll - you are the second person already to suggest more warms for tree, so I will definitely touch that up!

    linkov - Wow! Thank you for those images, and that blog post is awesome. The pictures are self-explanatory, and I will definitely be reading through the text. I will try to revisit the grass texture later, after my scene is a little more complete, and see what I can do about making it better :) It certainly has been one of the harder tileables to nail haha...
  • katana
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    katana polycounter lvl 14
    Jessica : Love your workups and all the extras that you have done. It's been a really great and educational thread.

    I was thinking that the tip of your tree could use more love. The grey is looking strange to me. I think if you layered in either some deeper muted green for depth and allowed the top branches to pop or split up the geo at the top and pulled/ twisted them to get more life out of the texture might work out for you.

    However it goes, you are doing a fantastic job, I think you will go far.
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Thanks katana! I will go back to the texture and see what I can do to layer in some more depth :)

    Hey guys, I have a question: currently I am sculpting my terrain and in my concept there are hills like way far in the distance. Would you put those on a separate terrain, or just tessellate this one a lot so that it is 'bigger' (I'm guessing lots of tessellation is the same thing as making the terrain bigger since you have more to work with??) I could also use fog to fake depth I guess - and could I also scale down the trees to help fake the distance, or do you think that would look weird and obvious? :0 sorry, i am noob at this haha...

    Here is the concept again:

    ERbv4.jpg

    Thanks!
    Jessica
  • System
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    System admin
    I would use 2 terrains. One for detail one for distance. You could try just painting a plane and use that almost like it was composited. Make a normal map for the plane as well. As long as it blends nicely with the front stuff could look great at a very low cost. Some DOF and fog could really sell the distance.

    Your work is pretty inspiring! Love your style
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Thanks Chris - I hadn't thought of compositing! I will consider both techniques as I continue sculpting all the detail stuff on this one terrain. The more I work on this, the less appealing it sounds to cram everything on one terrain haha.

    As far as tessellating goes, how many levels is too much/outrageous? I want a lot to work with, but I don't want to overdo it either. Also, I noticed that there is a new landscape editor in UDK - you can use 11 texture samples as opposed to the 4 you are allowed in the terrain editor - are those numbers correct? If so, I'm considering converting my terrain over to landscape editor since I currently have 7 texture samples I intend to use. Do you guys find landscape editor to be pretty legit, or is it kindof buggy due to how new it is still?
  • Un_Delincuente
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    Un_Delincuente polycounter lvl 6
    This thread is filled with a lot of great information! Your textures and work are simply outstanding great job.
  • Rhoutermans
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    Rhoutermans polycounter lvl 12
    Awesome work! good luck with the terrain :) The textures are really good! Hope to see more soon ~
  • Baddcog
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    Baddcog polycounter lvl 9
    Terrain depends. If it IS going in a game engine, you might be best doing the terrain there. I haven't used SDK so I can't make any calls on it. But most engines let you use a skybox camera for distance
    (In Hammer you build a 16th scale version of terrian outside player area and it gets rendered full size behind player terrain at all times. so it's costly as far as always rendering, but in Hammer the actual play 'airspace' is costly, so having a tiny model and tiny textures that cover what seems to be a huge area makes sense)

    If using Max it would be a great time to use the terrain painting tools (painting vert shape, not color).

    As for tessalation I think you still want to try and match the level of detail of your models. If they are fairly low, and you put them on buttery smooth terrain it won't match up all that great.

    I'd probably start pretty low poly on it, get all the massive shapes in. The tessalate a little, then paint in some details for more defined shapes/smooth things out. Then if it still looks rough you can tessalate more.
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Thanks Baddcog! This scene is going to be in UDK, therefore I am sculpting in UDK. What you say about the tessellation is really helpful - sometimes I forget about the bigger picture haha.
  • katana
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    katana polycounter lvl 14
    You might take a look at the Airborn mod by Neox and his group. They tackled a nice distance issue with clever painting and equally clever poly counts.

    http://www.moddb.com/mods/airborn/
  • Nate Broach
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    Nate Broach polycounter lvl 17
    Wow great work, don't know how I missed this thread. Really cool seeing how much improvement was made from the start of this thread.
  • Captain Narway
    I am so pumped to see this all in engine. Keep up the good work.
  • moose
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    moose polycount sponsor
    this stuff is awesome!! can't wait to see everything together, going to be great! keep goin!!!
  • System
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    System admin
    Is there a reason you are still using Terrain?
    Landscape handles tessellation much better. (http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Landscape.html)
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Thanks guys! katana, I am going to check out that link today - curious to see what they've done :0

    Chris, I actually didn't know about Landscape until after I had started sculpting for a bit. I was hesitant to start using it because somebody told me that when I convert my Terrain actor to be compatible with Landscape, I would lose some sculpting information or something (they didn't exactly say what, and I tried researching it to no avail). So I worried about it allll yesterday, only to decide, at the end of the day, that my sculpt was so much in the beginning stages anyway that I might as well switch over.

    So I am going to convert my terrain now. Talk about over-thinking things, lol
  • sybrix
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    sybrix polycounter lvl 12
    Great updates! :thumbup:

    I'm also pretty excited to see this completed. *subscribe*
  • paulsvoboda
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    paulsvoboda polycounter lvl 12
    Jessica, this stuff is awesome. It's great watching you prepare for each stage with the quick concepts/references you come up with. Really well-thought out and your textures are all really strong. I think your grass texture could be improved by more refined shapes. There was a beautiful grass texture painted a while ago by someone in the WAYWO thread (here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1222194&postcount=8492).

    Keep going, looking forward to seeing all this in engine.
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Thanks sybrix, paulsvoboda! I will definitely be revisiting my grass for further definition. I love that texture you linked - it's amazing!

    For now, here is my Corkwood trunk. It is not a full 1024 height because I'm planning to fit something above it, and this particular tree is much shorter/stouter than the Cypress and won't be needing quite as much length. There are 3 256 x 256 sections, of which the top two are tileable, and the texture also tiles horizontally. Still working on the branches/roots and foliage; in the meantime, critique and comments welcome!

    Here is my concept again:

    corkwood_study.jpg

    corkwood_trunk_02_pcount.jpg

    p.s. This time I'm gonna set the model up with an attempt at 3pt. lighting. For jeffro x]
  • Jeff Parrott
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    Jeff Parrott polycounter lvl 19
    Thanks Jessica!

    Awesome texture for the wood. Just lacking some subtle colors (blues and oranges). It reads a bit flat as a result. But the overall texture is gorgeous. It's a lot tighter and not as loose/painterly as the stuff you were doing previously. But the idea and texture itself is awesome.

    You're making awesome progress on this thread. Keep it up.
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Hmm, for the color, I do have blues for shadows, and the whole texture is already orange - so do you mean to add in some splashes of more saturated blues and oranges, and exaggerate what I have?

    Ah, I didn't mean for this to look very different from my other textures! Maybe I will make the leaves nice and painterly to balance out haha - I definitely don't want there to be style discrepancies in my environment. Thank you for the critique!
  • Di$array
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    Di$array polycounter lvl 5
    Your textures are fantastic. Great work all round. Also cheers for the little workflow tut. This is going to be a crackin' scene to look at.
  • Jeff Parrott
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    Jeff Parrott polycounter lvl 19
    Maybe try pushing some brighter oranges in highlight areas.
  • Jessica Dinh
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    Jessica Dinh polycounter lvl 10
    Thanks Di$array :) I will try that jeffro.
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