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Need Advice & Help from Texture Artists!!!

Discussion in 'Formats & External Tools' started by DyvineValentine, Sep 23, 2014.

  1. DyvineValentine

    DyvineValentine

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    Alright so I've been texturing for my models for a few months now but i can never get them to look realistic in Unity. I use Blender and Gimp,my process for creating textures is
    1. After creating models i UV unwrap
    2. Head into gimp and begin painting textures and such on the UV
    3. Sometimes create additional textures for UV such as A.O(ambient occlusion)
    4. save it then open unity and insert textures on models
    Im about to texture the inside and outside of a house i need to get these things right so i can have a good asset for me and my team's game were creating,so a few questions i have are
    1. Whats the steps to creating realistic textures? i understand you'll need Specular,Normal,Diffuse.
    2. Do i need to create all those maps to the UV or to the original textures
     
  2. Dustin-Horne

    Dustin-Horne

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    It's not just about the texture, it's about the shaders as well. It's kind of a loaded question as it totally depends on what kind of material you're trying to represent. Physically based materials are likely going to give you the most "realistic" look, at least for inorganics, but may be more expensive to render. You also may or may not need some maps like AO.

    Unity 5 will have a pretty nice uber shader that is physically based, but as we're still on Unity 4, you'll want to look at something like Alloy, Jove or Lux. Lux is free and Jove has a free version, so I'd start with one of those to see if you can get the hang of it, and then decide whether to move on to a more commercial product (though you may not need to. Lux for example is very good. I have not used any of the others). The free version of Jove is also the old original version.

    Here's the link to Lux
    https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/16000

    PBR is great for metal but don't get the idea that it's only for metal. Many of the examples you see will be metal or shiny plastic because they are extreme examples, but physically based materials are great for giving you a very realistic looking sheen (or lack thereof) for about any kind of surface.
     
  3. Grimwolf

    Grimwolf

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    The exact process is influenced pretty heavily by exactly what you want to make, but for a photo-realistic house like you mentioned...
    Since you're using Gimp, I can also assume you're using Blender for the modeling.
    You'll need to create the basic "low-poly" model that gets used in-game, then use subdivision to create a second "high-poly" model from the first, with the same basic dimensions but increased detail.
    You'll then want to pick up XNormal, a free tool for baking out maps from a high-poly.
    You'll use that to bake various maps using the high and low polys together, including a Normal map, a Curvature map, and a Height and/or Ambient Occlusion map.
    To make the Diffuse, you'll get a basic texture taken from a photograph, like a stone wall or something. Place that on the background layer in Gimp, and make sure the edges tile properly if necessary.
    Then overlay the Curvature and Height/AO on separate layers with different blend settings to help it fit to the look of the model with shading and improve the detail. You can also paint on some highlights or different hues if necessary.
    If you want to pull most of the detail from the texture directly rather than just using a high-poly, which can be difficult to match up accurately in this method with a detailed surface like bricks or something, you can also use Gimp to create a Normal directly from the Diffuse, then overlay that with your Normal baked from the high-poly to combine them.

    That would be a very basic explanation. You should follow some tutorials covering the basic process to figure out the details.

    Even if you've got a super flat and smooth surface, you'll still want to bake a Normal from a high-poly in order to smooth out the shading across corners and edges and such. In particular, you'll want to add a very slight bevel to the edges in order to accurately capture specular highlights.

    If you barely even know the basics of texturing, I personally wouldn't advise jumping straight into PBR.
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2014
  4. melkior

    melkior

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    Realism based art is the most difficult and time expensive art to produce.

    Aside from the excellent points by Dustin and Grimwolf I would add that you might be better off attempting to find a stylistic approach that your team can agree on .

    It would reduce the time to produce the art.
    It would also make it easier to produce a consistent look to your art.

    There are plenty of games that do this from Minecraft to Mario to Borderlands to BioShock to Team Fortress 2. (Note: you could argue Borderlands or Bioshock look 'realistic' but I would argue they look more like graphic novel illustration style than realism).

    I would further argue that AAA studios have 'realism' covered (and 200 man art teams to do it) and as you sound like a small team you would benefit a lot from exploring non-realism based visuals.

    Best of luck either way.
     
    DyvineValentine likes this.
  5. DyvineValentine

    DyvineValentine

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    what are some of the other styles?
    (ps:we dont want the game to be super realistic just to point where the games assets look good with nice shaders and quality textures.)
     
  6. DyvineValentine

    DyvineValentine

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    So i do all of this to the uv map ?
     
  7. melkior

    melkior

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    The number of styles possible is unlimited honestly. Realize there are styles that haven't been invented yet!

    However most of us are influenced and appreciate styles that we have seen in the past and our designs can be informed by things that we liked.

    The UV map is the physical coordinates of the vertices .. so no it wouldn't be done there.

    The style of your art would primary come from these things:

    - use of color
    Team Fortress 2 color guide http://www.teamfortress.com/contribute/images/tips_palette.gif
    Quake 2 Color Pallete

    - the style of the texture you create
    Cartoony or Illustrative example in Borderlands 2 style
    Realistic (not going to link something specific here as this is far too subjective and technology is constantly pushing this)
    Sci-Fi .. Gears of War, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Bioshock

    - shaders that you apply
    http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/shader-NormalFamily.html
    (that list is really just a basic built in begginer shader list , character shaders can and should often be specific to your needs)

    To give some style examples from TF2 check out this thread on Polycount:

    http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=73559

    But you need to figure out what kind of game you are making and what style suits it. And if necessary refine and come up with your own style guides!

    good luck
     
  8. Deon-Cadme

    Deon-Cadme

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    I just want to add and explain some of the things @melkior mentions one step further.

    - Shape
    He forgot to mention shape, you can create meaning by just changing the shape of a character or object. Is the character silhouette a square, triangle, circle etc? Where is the widest part?

    - Color
    Every color has several sub-conscious meanings, red is the color of love but also war. Bright color patterns are a sign of danger.

    - Patterns
    Soft edges gives a soothing reaction, hard edges puts you on edge, short patterns are fast while long ones are tedious etc...

    - Light
    Black and white are not colors, ask any real artist ;) Light is 2d dimensional setting for every color and you can even create different moods and reactions by tweaking the light in the color. What you actually do is changing the amount of light that a color keeps and reflects in nature

    - Real light
    This is stuff like the sun, lamps, torches and such. Their placement, strength, color etc also affects how we interpret everything in the environment. The fun part is that you can modify how a person percieve a "dangerous looking" character into a "trustworthy" character by balancing lights because they hide the warning signs in his appearance by changing the tone of their colors. Also, lights causes shadows and they are extremely important as well...

    There is more but this is just an extremely short examples of what art is really all about. All the greatest artists spent their whole lives studying their surroundings. Trying to find these hidden meanings so that they could use them in their works of art to trigger different emotional states, reactions etc.

    Now 3D graphics include other fun stuff like Geometry, textures, uv-maps, shaders, skeletons, animations and much more... the composition of a character or object depends on the results that you want. Add physics and many other features from games and you can cause really mind-blowing art-pieces.

    Back to realistic, to create a realistic character in a realistic environment, you need to understand the different things that makes us perceive something as realistic and how to fake the things that we still cannot simulate properly in a game. Only one little thing has to be out of place for the illusion to fall apart.
    Humans got hair, imperfections, the blood change the tone of the skin all over the body and some parts even get a blue or purple tone. We got shadows, pimples and lots of other stuff that you need to paint into your textures to get a realistic texture and it can still be thrown off if the shapes and proportions of your character is a tiny bit off.

    Modern game artists create a realistic human by first modelling (with subsurface mesh) or sculpt a highly detailed mesh (a few million polygons per here and there). The next step is to re-mesh it into a mesh with an acceptable number of polygons for the game engine.
    The highly detailed mesh is then typically baked into a normal texture for the low detailed mesh in an attempt to capture as many of the details as possible but remember that stuff can be lost because of texture resolution and other problems (this is why experience help when modelling the high detail mesh, you know when to stop). There also exist other methods to preserve the details but this is the most common.
    Ambient occlusion and other textures are typically also baked from the high detail mesh to the low detail mesh.
    Then comes the actual texture itself, an experienced artists can paint skin, eyes and other stuff straight out of their head, they know how muscles, blood etc affects different areas but that takes a lot of time. The easy solution is to paint several, high resolution photographs of real people onto the texture :)

    This is just a simple explanation but it will give you a bit of help and I would recommend that you head over to Youtube and Google for more information. People study this stuff for years and there is always a lot more around the corner to learn ;) Remember at the end of the day that there is also shaders and lights etc that affects your result and that different tricks along the way can be used to create "impossible" results.

    About different styles... there is a ton of them, you can look into painting, comics, games and you will notice that there is a forest of styles. There are also different regions around the world that has developed iconic styles... Japan got several anime style of their own, Hong Kong adapted these into their own unique "anime-flavored" style. European and American realistic comics tend to look a bit different and so on ;)
     
  9. wccrawford

    wccrawford

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    I thought the whole point of PBR was that it makes it a lot easier to get realistic results. Look up the material in a chart, paint it on, and be done. I'm looking forward to apps that make this even easier, too, with a whole host of presets that you can just paint and it'll take care of each of the image maps automatically. Substance Designer can help with that, but they still need a lot more pre-made basic textures IMO. (They have a *ton* of advanced textures. I want basics like "brushed steel", "gold", "leather", etc. Admittedly, I haven't paid attention lately, so maybe they do now.)
     
  10. Dustin-Horne

    Dustin-Horne

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    Have to tried the beta trial for Substance Painter? :) It works pretty well and has a very Photoshop feel to it with the way it treats layers and masking for the most part. There are still some issues with it, but overall works pretty well and if you own a license you can export your maps. It even has some nice brushes that allow you to add detail to your normal.
     
  11. melkior

    melkior

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    I have used substance painter a bit and find it both really cool and frustrating to use.

    I made this skull this past week in Silo2 and Mudbox and tried painting it in Substance Painter and this is the best I could do with the time I had:



    I wanted a more yellow look but just had a devil of a time of making the colors work so I ended up with this off-grey look that is okay but not what I was trying to hit.

    Whereas in Mudbox I did a very quick paintjob which came up with the tones I was looking for much easier but doesnt look as weathered as Substance Painter did:



    Finally here is the skull in the scene (I went with the Mudbox paint as it looks better in game)

     
  12. Dustin-Horne

    Dustin-Horne

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    You could always paint your tones in Mudbox and use Substance Designer to do the weathering and stuff I guess since you can import your existing maps.
     
  13. melkior

    melkior

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    @Dustin ; yeah I usually do my texturing in Photoshop. The point of the testing I did was to see what the paint capabilities of each tool was and how stiff the learning curve would be.

    I'll say for sure in Substance Painter the availability of different substances to paint with greatly effects the output capability at your disposal. I do own Substance Designer so I can design substances to paint with eventually but I really just wanted to see what both tools could do without too much assistance.

    My workflow will probably eventually involve all the tools something like

    - low poly model in silo2
    - uvw in silo 2
    - sculpt in mudbox
    - bake normals in mudbox
    - basic first pass diffuse in mudbox
    - take diffuse in to photoshop and bring it up to snuff
    - take diffuse in to substance painter and weather it
    - generate final PBR material in substance
     
  14. Dustin-Horne

    Dustin-Horne

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    Yeah I have the indie bundle so I have substance designer too, although I haven't been using it. Just playing around with the maps with Unity's new PBR shader in U5. While I understand the concepts, I'm not a very good artist (I am a programmer after all). :) So I tend to spend weeks in Blender just to never finish something a seasoned artist could produce in about an hour.
     
  15. DyvineValentine

    DyvineValentine

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    thanks for the elaboration it really helped
     
  16. BrandyStarbrite

    BrandyStarbrite

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    Don't forget Korean Anime. ;)
    Those Japanese Studios hire alot of those Korean Anime artists.
    I must admit. Korean Anime has a distinctive style of it's own compared to Japanese Anime. :p
     
  17. BrandyStarbrite

    BrandyStarbrite

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  18. DyvineValentine

    DyvineValentine

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    ive been working on a character for about 2 days now, heres a picture of the ninja modeled, textured,and fully rigged. But as you can see my texture looks a bit cartoony especially in the eyes, and idk how to give it that realistic eye effect ( not to realistic but just enough so that it wont look so cartoony).
     
  19. twiesner

    twiesner

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    It looks like you did not paint lights and shadows into your texture thus giving it a flat cartoonish look. There are plenty tutorials on hand painted character textures on the web you can look at to get ideas on how to improve the look of your ninja. But if you want to focus on the eyes, you are missing the the reflection glare (the white dot(s) in the pupils).
     
  20. DyvineValentine

    DyvineValentine

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    in order to make that reflection glare do i need to create a set of eyeballs or can i paint it on?
     
  21. BrandyStarbrite

    BrandyStarbrite

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    Painting it on, or onto the eyeball(s) texture is the easiest way.

    But if you plan on making separate eyeballs that move.
    Then making a separate texture for those eyeballs
    and painting on the reflection Glare, onto that texture would work too.

    As an example, check the reflection glare, on the eyes of this Makehuman skin texture atlas.
    You might have to zoom in too.

    http://www.makehuman.org/sites/www.makehuman.org/files/skins/1/1327324837/texture.png
     
  22. DyvineValentine

    DyvineValentine

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    hm alright ill begin to work on painting a texture in gimp
     
  23. Autarkis

    Autarkis

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    As someone just said above your last reply, painting in some lights and shadows will be beneficial to your texturing. Bake some Ambient Occlusion in your 3d package and import that to gimp and multiply it ( play with the opacity) it will help pop things a little bit. On the eyes, paint a little shadow were the eyelids touch the eyeball, as well as some shadows and highlights to make it feel more rounded. Everything is just way too flat at the moment.
    If you're going cartoony, i'd highly recommend looking at some 2d cartoon painting tutorials, and practice on those, it will help gaining some traditional painting techniques to make that texture better.
    It's also too monochrome of a color scheme. You have good opportunity to bring in secondary and tertiary colors to the outfit. Paint in some folds on the clothing as well. :)
     
    DyvineValentine likes this.
  24. DyvineValentine

    DyvineValentine

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  25. DyvineValentine

    DyvineValentine

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    heres the eyes i got so far after all the help
    :cool:
     

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