I like the stylized approach. Right now I think that the color, diffuse texture does not respond so well to the forms of the stones. I mean the forms (geometry) are stylized, and real nice. But I think the texture (diffuse) is to small, and too much. It could be a little bit more subtle. I hope you understand, what I mean. :poly121:
I do agree with ivanzu, too. The bigger stones are easy to spot.
Darksiders styled art tends to be heavily diffuse-powered. Id say if you want to use a photo to get the gritty details, I'd get rid of a lot of the noise and focus on getting large, readable shapes. What your wall is missing is the "I'M A FUCKING WALL" that is present in darksiders walls.
Your sculpt seems like it had very sharp edges, take a look at orbs sculpt, it has defined, yet softer edges, relying more on the two planes coming together rather than a sharp crease to say "edge". When baked, the softer edges will read better, while sharper edges like yours will begin to become lost at lower resolutions. Try lowering your map sizes to 512 or so and see if you can make out all of the important bits. Any time your map is viewed from an angle or from a slight distance, it'll be mipped- ie: shown at a lower resolution.
I'd try to create some large, CHUNKY stones with some small stones wedged in between rather than the large wall of medium stones you have now. This will really pop out the larger stones and make some contrast in sizes. You should also focus on creating rock-ish shapes in the cracks and gaps btween stones.
Your diffuse is very cloudy, check out the smaller details in both Orbs work and the Darksiders assets. Each has structure, so if all you saw was a small section of a rock face, you'd still be able to tell that it's rock.
That also applies to the smaller details in the normal map. In Orbs piece, the sculpt has the major forms covered and is really carrying the object, but on areas with nothing going on, there is a subtle rock detail that catches light at odd angles and just reinforces the rockiness of it all.
About the diffuse- Go ahead and paint in some lighting, and keep pushing it and polishing it till you go a little too far. The diffuse is the most important map in Darksiders, the normal and spec are there to help give it some depth and a 3d feel, but all of the sexiness is started and grounded in the diffuse. Without any map other than diffuse, your object should resemble whatever material/feeling you are trying to create, and should have that 'essence' that will make it cool.
Play with the colors a bit, and take out the green moss for now. Your stone is grey/slightly purple without the moss and that's it. A lot of Darksiders stones have many hues. Try pumping in a medium value/saturation into the base texture, and then painting in some colors and building up to a lighter texture. Then paint in some details, compliment the shapes of your sculpt with these and try to say 'stone'.
Check this piece by jfletch out:
There are multiple hues and variations, but it all has structure. there are many details that say 'wood', lots of interesting, tasty bits to look at, but they are all painted in a way to read well, and fit on such a small texture and for an entire character!
Also: The screenshot you have of the Darksiders rock is made up of a larger diffuse/normal combo with a tiling detail normal applied to some general geo. I'ts effective and cheap, but not the best looking.
You have the technical skills, it seems. You just need a kick in the right direction.
Hi there, I think the noise is not really a noise issue, but more of how you added the green moss. Its just overlayed ontop of the rock noise, so thers dubble the noise in the green areas, you should give more love to that part, right now it doesnt really look like grass/moss but more like just green stone.
the normals and then sculpt looks GREAT, Its the diffuse you should work on.
Well as it's been said the sculpt doesn't really have any major issue.
The diffuse instead can be taken quite far in terms of quality; to me it looks like you basically taken your bakes and overlayed them on one or maybe 2 photos of rock and called it done... while this may actually work in some cases, you have quite a lot of stones in your textures and so they should have some minor variation...
try making masks of several stones and apply some color variation (color or brightness overlays) and "separate" the texture on which the bakes are overlayed (i don't know if this make any sense, maybe just look at this for reference PhilipK 1PhilipK 2). Also THIS guy is pretty awesome, and lastly if you look for Orb's Brush video on vimeo, he explain basically how he does his noise overlay in sculpts.hope it helps!
The biggest issue I have with your wall is the the look of irregular stones stuck in mud. We actually had a texture that is surprisingly similar to this in DS2, but we used it as a rubble filler behind the wall, and it ended up getting cut because it didn't fit. The issue I see is that the rocks you have are too rounded and natural, you'd see those kind of rocks on a path, not a wall. For a wall, you need angular squarish rocks you can stack.
Detailing wise, you only have cuts and cracks. When sculpting, we add lots of chips and pockmarks as well to break up the smooth edges. Your cracks are pretty decent, but you have a few that are unnatural. You want to avoid the squiggly Y cracks you have that just end in nothing, rocks don't crack like that. The cracks should be straightish splits.
Texture wise, we actually do use a little photo noise to add grunge. So you were on track in your first example. Just try to be subtle about it.
Our NDA ended this weekend, so you'll probably be seeing a lot of art dumps from environment artists on DS2 in the next week. I'll be adding more work as well and doing a proper thread when its all up. You can check out my website to see the texture.
I don't think the noise by itself is the issue. You although have only the high frequency noise. You want some medium frequency noise too. Also you want way less saturated noise. Your's look too colorful.
That background wall you referenced is actually the one I was referring to. It started out very similar to yours, with individual stones very clear and visible. As you can see in the final version, we blended them back into the mud a lot so they weren't as prominent.
I think my confusion is that you are kind of straddling the two walls. Your stone shapes are like rough filler stones, but the clean textures are like the main wall. In my personal opinion, I think your wall would benefit from pushing it more to the muddy background style. I would creep up the mud around the rocks and blend some edges into the mud so that every rock doesn't have a clear cut out. One of my favorite methods for doing grime is to use a fuzzy/blurry/speckle brush to paint in mud colors, and then run a smart sharpen filter on it to enhance the grittyness.
If you paint mud over the image, run that mud layer through crazy bump and overlay it/mask it in over your normal map so that you paint out the sharp angles in the normal map that should be covered by mud.
We used photoref in a couple ways. You can color sample some photo grime you like to get the colors you want, you can throw some grime over the image in an overlay as a base coat and mask in only the details you want, you can overlay an image and use it as a guide to paint over. You can also just straight up overlay some photo details for surfacing info, we did that for stuff like rock surfacing.
I like the style you are going for and its quite a nice texture you have at the moment. I have some critique though.
These areas in particular bug me. At these points the rocks seem to be merging together or overlapping each other which looks wrong aesthetically and wouldn't occur in stone walls. The stones should either have a gap in between or the shapes of the two rocks would have aligned and be resting against each other still creating a solid distinction between the rocks.
As well as this your stone wall doesn't appear to have any mortar to join the rocks. This would be fine on small rock walls. But for anything over (I guess) 4 feet or so would use mortar. In your texture it looks like you have just used more rock.
Also you have large details and some medium details. But you need that third level of fine (smaller) details to make the texture readable on multiple levels. I really like the approach and focus you have with this. Super smart move to take you time and get a good handle on things.
That's looking awesome! The Y cracks still seem a little weird, maybe try making them just a single crack and see if it looks better. I've started avoiding Y cracks in some cases in my own work because they are pretty distinctive.
I think baking in a little more lighting info would push it a little more towards the stylized route. If you take your normal map into crazybump, go to the specular channel, set the enhance detail to 99 and the slope influence to somewhere around 30-50, you can generate some fake lighting info to overlay and see how it would look without spending a lot of time.
Dude, your sculpts are looking really great. It's a little hard to find much to critique, but here's a couple things I thought.
A. This crack seems a little weird because it looks like the same crack is running from one rock to the next makes the two feel connected even tho they are not. If something did hit them or the wall shifted and made those two rocks crack, the crack would probably be different in each rock, not so connected.
B. This crack just looks way too much like the crack in Rock A. Same size and shape. And with them being right next to each other, makes it more obvious.
C. This rock and crack feels a little strange. Not bad, but almost like it should just be two separate rocks. The shape feels a little like its trying too hard to fit in that space, too convenient and the crack seems deep enough that it should almost be cracking this rock into two pieces or something??
As far as making it more "stylized," I think it depends on what kind of "stylized" you are looking for. This texture probably is really close to fitting into the Darksiders style as their style is sort of hyper stylized, bordering on realistic in their materials. If you want it to be more hand painted in appearance, than I would suggest toning down the photo/grunge/detail overlays and or painting them out in areas with a mask and getting a bit more straight up hand painting right in your diffuse, even if it's just in some sort of blending mode.
I did a couple hand painted rock textures a little bit back that have are much more "hand painted" styled. Because they have not photo overlays. Check em out here if you want:
Replies
I do agree with ivanzu, too. The bigger stones are easy to spot.
Do you know this thread by Orb?
Keep it up! :thumbup:
Your sculpt seems like it had very sharp edges, take a look at orbs sculpt, it has defined, yet softer edges, relying more on the two planes coming together rather than a sharp crease to say "edge". When baked, the softer edges will read better, while sharper edges like yours will begin to become lost at lower resolutions. Try lowering your map sizes to 512 or so and see if you can make out all of the important bits. Any time your map is viewed from an angle or from a slight distance, it'll be mipped- ie: shown at a lower resolution.
I'd try to create some large, CHUNKY stones with some small stones wedged in between rather than the large wall of medium stones you have now. This will really pop out the larger stones and make some contrast in sizes. You should also focus on creating rock-ish shapes in the cracks and gaps btween stones.
Your diffuse is very cloudy, check out the smaller details in both Orbs work and the Darksiders assets. Each has structure, so if all you saw was a small section of a rock face, you'd still be able to tell that it's rock.
That also applies to the smaller details in the normal map. In Orbs piece, the sculpt has the major forms covered and is really carrying the object, but on areas with nothing going on, there is a subtle rock detail that catches light at odd angles and just reinforces the rockiness of it all.
About the diffuse- Go ahead and paint in some lighting, and keep pushing it and polishing it till you go a little too far. The diffuse is the most important map in Darksiders, the normal and spec are there to help give it some depth and a 3d feel, but all of the sexiness is started and grounded in the diffuse. Without any map other than diffuse, your object should resemble whatever material/feeling you are trying to create, and should have that 'essence' that will make it cool.
Play with the colors a bit, and take out the green moss for now. Your stone is grey/slightly purple without the moss and that's it. A lot of Darksiders stones have many hues. Try pumping in a medium value/saturation into the base texture, and then painting in some colors and building up to a lighter texture. Then paint in some details, compliment the shapes of your sculpt with these and try to say 'stone'.
Check this piece by jfletch out:
There are multiple hues and variations, but it all has structure. there are many details that say 'wood', lots of interesting, tasty bits to look at, but they are all painted in a way to read well, and fit on such a small texture and for an entire character!
Also: The screenshot you have of the Darksiders rock is made up of a larger diffuse/normal combo with a tiling detail normal applied to some general geo. I'ts effective and cheap, but not the best looking.
You have the technical skills, it seems. You just need a kick in the right direction.
the normals and then sculpt looks GREAT, Its the diffuse you should work on.
The diffuse instead can be taken quite far in terms of quality; to me it looks like you basically taken your bakes and overlayed them on one or maybe 2 photos of rock and called it done... while this may actually work in some cases, you have quite a lot of stones in your textures and so they should have some minor variation...
try making masks of several stones and apply some color variation (color or brightness overlays) and "separate" the texture on which the bakes are overlayed (i don't know if this make any sense, maybe just look at this for reference PhilipK 1 PhilipK 2). Also THIS guy is pretty awesome, and lastly if you look for Orb's Brush video on vimeo, he explain basically how he does his noise overlay in sculpts.hope it helps!
The biggest issue I have with your wall is the the look of irregular stones stuck in mud. We actually had a texture that is surprisingly similar to this in DS2, but we used it as a rubble filler behind the wall, and it ended up getting cut because it didn't fit. The issue I see is that the rocks you have are too rounded and natural, you'd see those kind of rocks on a path, not a wall. For a wall, you need angular squarish rocks you can stack.
Detailing wise, you only have cuts and cracks. When sculpting, we add lots of chips and pockmarks as well to break up the smooth edges. Your cracks are pretty decent, but you have a few that are unnatural. You want to avoid the squiggly Y cracks you have that just end in nothing, rocks don't crack like that. The cracks should be straightish splits.
Texture wise, we actually do use a little photo noise to add grunge. So you were on track in your first example. Just try to be subtle about it.
Our NDA ended this weekend, so you'll probably be seeing a lot of art dumps from environment artists on DS2 in the next week. I'll be adding more work as well and doing a proper thread when its all up. You can check out my website to see the texture.
Here's an example I did on DS2.
I think my confusion is that you are kind of straddling the two walls. Your stone shapes are like rough filler stones, but the clean textures are like the main wall. In my personal opinion, I think your wall would benefit from pushing it more to the muddy background style. I would creep up the mud around the rocks and blend some edges into the mud so that every rock doesn't have a clear cut out. One of my favorite methods for doing grime is to use a fuzzy/blurry/speckle brush to paint in mud colors, and then run a smart sharpen filter on it to enhance the grittyness.
If you paint mud over the image, run that mud layer through crazy bump and overlay it/mask it in over your normal map so that you paint out the sharp angles in the normal map that should be covered by mud.
We used photoref in a couple ways. You can color sample some photo grime you like to get the colors you want, you can throw some grime over the image in an overlay as a base coat and mask in only the details you want, you can overlay an image and use it as a guide to paint over. You can also just straight up overlay some photo details for surfacing info, we did that for stuff like rock surfacing.
These areas in particular bug me. At these points the rocks seem to be merging together or overlapping each other which looks wrong aesthetically and wouldn't occur in stone walls. The stones should either have a gap in between or the shapes of the two rocks would have aligned and be resting against each other still creating a solid distinction between the rocks.
As well as this your stone wall doesn't appear to have any mortar to join the rocks. This would be fine on small rock walls. But for anything over (I guess) 4 feet or so would use mortar. In your texture it looks like you have just used more rock.
Hope this helps =D
Try using http://download.pixologic01.com/download.php?f=/library/matcap/digitaldecoy/al_normal_map.zip instead.
Also you have large details and some medium details. But you need that third level of fine (smaller) details to make the texture readable on multiple levels. I really like the approach and focus you have with this. Super smart move to take you time and get a good handle on things.
I think baking in a little more lighting info would push it a little more towards the stylized route. If you take your normal map into crazybump, go to the specular channel, set the enhance detail to 99 and the slope influence to somewhere around 30-50, you can generate some fake lighting info to overlay and see how it would look without spending a lot of time.
A. This crack seems a little weird because it looks like the same crack is running from one rock to the next makes the two feel connected even tho they are not. If something did hit them or the wall shifted and made those two rocks crack, the crack would probably be different in each rock, not so connected.
B. This crack just looks way too much like the crack in Rock A. Same size and shape. And with them being right next to each other, makes it more obvious.
C. This rock and crack feels a little strange. Not bad, but almost like it should just be two separate rocks. The shape feels a little like its trying too hard to fit in that space, too convenient and the crack seems deep enough that it should almost be cracking this rock into two pieces or something??
As far as making it more "stylized," I think it depends on what kind of "stylized" you are looking for. This texture probably is really close to fitting into the Darksiders style as their style is sort of hyper stylized, bordering on realistic in their materials. If you want it to be more hand painted in appearance, than I would suggest toning down the photo/grunge/detail overlays and or painting them out in areas with a mask and getting a bit more straight up hand painting right in your diffuse, even if it's just in some sort of blending mode.
I did a couple hand painted rock textures a little bit back that have are much more "hand painted" styled. Because they have not photo overlays. Check em out here if you want:
www.jessecarpenter3d.com
Just depends on what you're aiming for.
Lots of words, but your stuff looks great! Keep it up.