First time posting here, was recommended by a friend who comes here alot. I am working on a full desert scene, low poly, normal mapped, and spec mapped, so that I can get used to more recent advances in tech and what not. This is my first attempt at normal mapping, and I used the photoshop plugins to make the normal. I am actually toying with the idea of making my models in mudbox, since I can make a better normal that way. Anyway, enough jibba jabba, heres what I have so far. Please critique and rip apart.



I have a ways to go when it comes to texturing by hand, so any help you guys can offer would be excellent.

The cactus looks pretty good, but the stone has severe stretching. It basicly looks like you slapped a photo on. Perhaps you should draw a concept of how you want to the rock to be, and hand paint the shading, then overlay with photos if you want photos in badly.

I think the texture on the rock is fine, but you need to go back and work out your unwrap job.

You're off to a good start but far from a usable asset. I would suggest that you add some smaller rocks, alpha grass, maybe even a small cactus around the base of the rock and cactus to help them blend into whatever scene you put them in.

Wires and texture sheets if you can post em would help me, help you with your unwrap job =)

Hey there umbrella man, I agree with Vig, texture on the rock is fine, it's issues with the unwrap that's killing it..but you know that. Really like that cactus, it's fun. Take a second look at the unwrap and keep at it. Update! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Yeah the unwrap is terrible on the rock. I need to totally rework it, I have just been half stepping on that because the thought of redoing that texture is a nightmare, it took me something like 6 hours texture alone to finish. I'll post the wires and texture sheets later. Thanks again guys and Gals.

Heres the uv layout, and the skin. I would like to kill the stretching without doing much to the skin if possible, but if not, screw it, I can always do it again.

Try to follow the form of the rock more in the UV map lay-out if you're not afraid of wasting some space. That, or try painting the outlines of rocks in some 3D paint mode if possible and then clean it up in the image manipulation program of your choice.

Hey,

I think your main problem has already been mentioned, but I just thought I'd share my method for this particular brand of rock. Conveniently enough, I'd modeled one awhile ago for project I worked on.

I'm assuming you pelted this, correct? Your seams look like they're set up right, so my only guess is you didn't do any relaxing. If you did, I'd give it another go, with these settings. These settings aren't concrete, but they're a pretty good balance for most relax functions. Also, it's guaranteed that you'll need to manually edit your meshes to some degree. If you were already aware of this tool, hope I didn't insult your intelligence [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Here's a picture, hope it helps!

@Sayanora: Hey thanks, that really helped. I wanted to use pelt mapping because it's quick and I want aquick art pipeline. I didn't realize that relaxing did that for you. After I tried I came up with this.





You guys were surprisingly helpful. Normally nobody steps up to help on other forums. Thanks a lot guys. I'll post stuff as I make it. Feel like I may be scrimping too much on the poly counts, what do you think?

Thats better than it was before, good job on the improvement.




In the texture on the left, you can see the smudgy areas in the encircled area. This is probably from using the clone stamp or pattern stamp brush too heavily. In the image on the right, you can see a soft edge where the two different rock patterns meet. If you want to improve that you need to match the colors and patterns up so it looks like the same rock. You could probably hide it with some cracks, or some more of the moss you have growing in the middle. Good job and good luck

About the unwrap. Pelt mapping is good but best used in chunks on complex shapes. You'll never be able to get rid of all the stretching but you can do a few things to minimize it.

1) You have natural seams in the rock you can exploit and hide your texture seams, make full use of them.

2) As Penzer mentioned don't paint a blurry defuse do what you can to better blend photo and hand painted. If its all hand painted I apologize, but some areas look MSPainted while others look top notch.

3) Just because its one object doesn't mean it needs to be one UV piece. I would break it up in 3 pieces and do 3 cylinder unwraps or pelt maps. Doing them in 3 pieces means there will be less stretching taking place on each piece. The less you have to POUND something flat the less stretching there will be.

The unwrap you have now is stretching the sides and inner pieces to pull them out and make them flat with the top. Thats fine if your working on a top down game. The angle presented to us suggests otherwise so I suggest you unwrap it something like this...

Also go ahead and paint up one tileable rocky texture that you plan to use here. No point in trying to "stay within the lines" while painting your uniquely unwrapped piece. There are MANY benefits to using tileable textures when it comes to natural environment art.

I actually have two sets of unwraps. One is a pelt, one is one that I did with three separate pieces like Vig has above. It seems like I have a hell of a hard time keeping things from stretching in the one that is broken into pieces. That one also requires I redo the texture, which would probably take another whole day for me to do. Since this is just one of about 19 models I have to complete, I'll probably call this one done, and come back to it later. Thanks for the advice. I'll keep more coming as I get it.

EDIT: Or maybe not. I guess I'll give texturing the other unwrap a try just for shits and giggles and see what floats up.

holy fuck metabus that new icon gif you have is slick as fuck!

Heres a new one. About 3 hours, kinda stumped on the texture, there are parts I like, and parts I despise. Don't know what I should do at this point.

That looks pretty good, I was wrong about first one, that texture was better than I thought. You seem to have painted to match the distortion, it's a way. Personally I would have unwrapped like this: seam around the top, flat, seams around the humps (both cases there are natural seams there so it's ok. Then I'd just cylinder/pelt map the rest with a seam from top to bottom, then you'd have a pretty rectangular uv chunk for it. You could then use chuggnutts uv tool for straightening out some if you want quickly.

Umbrella man,

It really depends on the style you are going for. This latest piece is 10x more appealing to me because it seems to hit closer to a style mark, if that makes sense. That is to say, your first texture seems to use photo source with a soft clone brush. This came out blurry, and a bit incoherent. The way the UVs are set up, the texture is placed on the mesh incoherently, and does not look like a natural rock formation. Also, the mirroring in the texture is a turnoff, as you could just mirror the UVs and save texture space. If you use unique texture space for everything, make everything unique. That said, using photo source incorrectly can be a major turnoff, and really hurt your piece.

This last painty version has it's quirks, but it hits closer to the painty/cartoony style. It's consistent, and the UVs / Values on the texture fit the form better. The actual formation of the rocks is stylized in the mesh and this helps a lot. Though the rock formation on the texture is quite a bit off in some areas.

Another thing you want to keep in mind is how much lighting you want to bake into the texture. If you are doing a straight diffuse, with no normals, and you do not have dense geometry, then I would suggest picking 3 base colors, light, mid, and dark. Just slap those down boldly with your global light source in mind. Then you can work from there. I might suggest doing a render to texture, or pits'n'peaks just to see where you might want your values to lay, but I would advise against shortcuts while you are learning.

I would be more specific but it's late and I do not have my wacom on this machine to do a paint over to explain better, but i can do this later if you would like. Keep at it, the more mileage the better you will get!



Metabus, I dig the avatar [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

If you could maybe circle the parts you like, and the parts you think are off. That would be a great help towards pointing me in the right direction. As it stands, I look at this model, and I just don't know what I am doing right, or wrong.

EDIT: My goal is to get this peice rendered to a point to where it no longer looks cartoony. I want to strive for as real as I can get it. So when I say I don't know where to go from here, I mean I don't know what the next step in texturing is to get this looking more real, and less painted.

If your looking for good reference do a google image search for joshua tree CA and then start browsing. J Tree has boulder formations very similar to what your painting. Smooth rock with lots of seams.

Ok I went in and did a normal map in mudbox. I need to kill alot of the baked in shadows to make the texture work, but I wanted to get your opinions on the normal before moving on. Heres the reference.



Heres the normal



Now that I look at these I probably need to make the ridges a hell of a lot smaller...

EDIT: Ahh hell don't know why I posted this, it's so obviously stupid. I need to go back and rethink this thing. Sorry for spamming.

Ok I think this is a little better, I still need to adjust specularity, and redo the texture to fit the new design. I meay unwrap again and rebake. What do you guys think?

The defuse is looking better but you're all over the style meter from the start of this thread till now. I think you are getting closer to a working asset, just nail down if you're going for cartoon or realistic.

I would tone down the spec, and you might want to see what it looks like when you remove it? Most rocks, especially rocks in dry places are hardly ever that shinny, unless someone coats them in something?

You're headed in the right direction keep at it, big improvements with every post! =)

That last version is 10x better than the others. Shiny as all hell but you said you are fixing that so no biggy.

Alright, thanks guys for the suggestions, I hope I followed them sufficiently. Heres the version that I am calling done, but that's tentative on feedback I'm guessing.

My next prop is going to be a desert ruin. Heres what I have so far.



Is there anything glaringly wrong with it so far? It's still very much a wip, and I intend on blowing more walls out, I would just like to know if I am going to sun into problems with some of my divisions later.