Need Help Critting these texture sheets (56K warn)

RonanHayes · on 12-07-2006 04:20 PM

Please note, I am a programmer trying to get contract artists to get these weapons correct.

I've been trying to get these textures done correctly for the past 3 weeks, and I have finally gotten the artists to at least get the correct look and feel, just now need to get them to squezz as much detail out of the Texture Sheets as possible.

Here is our current quality that we have. Both the M1 Garand and Kar both consist of 2x 1024x1024 textures and then a seperate texture the Clip and Bullet.

RonanHayes · on 12-07-2006 04:23 PM

I again just want to point out, the frist two weapons (watermarked) are compelted by team members for 1944d-day

While the rest are being done by contract artists. I am looking for as much advice and crits as possible to bring all the textures upto par.

They are allowed:

2x1024x1024 for the weapon
Another texture sheet for the straps
Another texture for an stands or tripods
Another texture for the weapon and bullets.

Joao Sapiro · on 12-07-2006 06:50 PM

well what lacks on the textures is lighting consistency in my opinion, some have on the metal but the wood doesnt present it, some other have the Blurry lightning sindrom . ill write something more extensive later [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

RonanHayes · on 12-07-2006 06:55 PM

Cheers matey

Available for freelance eh!

MoP · on 12-08-2006 02:27 AM

An entire 512x512 sheet just for the strap of that M1 is ridiculous, especially when there's also a strap texture in the main sheet. Some sensible UV-mapping would mean that extra 512x512 could be removed completely, and just some simple shading/rivets added to the strap texture on the main sheet.

Generally those UV layouts are incredibly wasteful, and I reckon those two 1024 sheets (especially on the Thompson) could be combined into a single sheet and save a bunch of memory.

Johny's right about the lighting though, generally the lighting on the metal of the ones you're trying to get into shape is much less directional and sharp than the "good" textures. Also their scratches and colour variation could be more sharp and obvious, from a distance the wood and metal sections just look like solid colour.

Emil Mujanovic · on 12-08-2006 05:37 AM

Johny basically said what I wanted to say, so I second his comments. MoP made some great points also... So I've been no real help [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

-caseyjones

Jackablade · on 12-08-2006 06:51 AM

I think there needs to a 3D game artist liscence introduced. In order to be allowed to work on current gen the recipient must have worked on a Handheld title. That'd stamp out these hideously inefficient texture sheets and models that are springing up more and more as hardware becomes more powerful. Once you've textured an entire games worth of beasties with 32^2 and 64^2 textures such wastage is just... sickening.

Uh sorry, you probably don't need to hear me whinging. I think you'd probably do well to restrict your artists a bit more. Get them to reuse similar parts of the texture for differing parts of the gun where possible. If you've got two metal panels that are essentially the same, draw one and UV it onto both panels. There are a lot of places where you could do this. If you were to do this, along with some generally better anrangement of the UVs you could easily cut your current texture usage down by at least a third.

Maybe you could assign your artists some DS res models to cut down that complacency, eh.

Joshua Stubbles · on 12-08-2006 11:32 AM

As MoP said, those UV layouts are atrocious.
The textures are pretty good, but lack a lot of color. If you actually ever held a gun, you can see that there's a plethora of color in there. From blue and red, to green and yellow. Gunmetal is very colorful, yet yours is quite mono.

The highlights on some of the weapons look a bit like plastic to me, instead of wood. You need to make the highlights take the curvature of the wood into account. Like faking a bump map. Highlights would not be perfectly distributed alone the edge, when the wood has bump grains.

One thing you could do, if you're using 3dsmax, is to bake the info into a specular texture. Make a generic bump/normal map from the wood's diffuse. Then setup some specular lighting and RTT that into an overlay texture, or even into the main base texture.

RonanHayes · on 12-27-2006 06:05 AM

Just some updates. I would really appreciated some heavy crits on these. I feel the base texture is blurred for no reason, which makes it loose alot of it's details. Or certainly doesn't help

I also find some of the UV layout is rather wasteful putting details in where you would not see them.

Crits would be great, circling things in big red photoshop paint would be really really helpful.

RonanHayes · on 12-27-2006 06:12 AM

Renders can be seen:

http://www.1944d-day.com/pr/December2006/Wip/

I didn't want to add them as it would have really pushed up the size of the thread.

Really appreciate som extreme crits on these. The contractor is really pushing for me to pay up, but I am no where near happy with them, other than the huge delays, and historical in-accuracy on them at the momment, I really want for them simply to get the basics correct so we can proceed with the finer details.

Really appreciate it

pior · on 12-27-2006 06:44 AM

Hey Ronan

I'd say that the result look quite nice, but there is still problems with the UVs. Maybe a first step would be to reduce the budget? 512 instead of 1024 would push the artists towards optimization. As it is now there is so many textured duplicates that really only need to be there once, just like on M1919A4-03.jpg and M1A1Thompson1.jpg.

Is the same person taking care of unwrapping and texturing? If so, he/she has total control over the way things are put together and is not restricted to a layout where every bit has a clear function. Like, you can squeeze long tubes down to something much shorter on the texture, and have the UVs fit inside that in order to save space - while still being careful with stretching, aso.

Just like with that strap texture that you could very well get down to something like this:

I did't make any resolution change but just kept the redundant bits out and its now a 128*64. Then you can divide the strap model into sections, and have their UVs to overlap on top of this.

Hope this helps!