Topic awaiting preservation: Textures on Knuckle (Page 1 of 1)

Here are two posts I made some place else concerning the maps on the low poly melee weapon I posted over here. Finally getting off my lazy butt and posting over here.

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Back when I did Pui Pui, I didn't show much of anything when it came to painting the textures. Matter of fact, the painting that I did do on Pui Pui was rather quick and sleazy.

Since I'm working on a low poly model and going all out with the textures, I thought I would do some Show-n-Tell to make up for Pui Pui.

I've started painting 6 seperate maps for silly melee weapon that I modeled a long time ago. The original textures are 800x800.

So far I've only gotten nuts on the blade. The rest will eventually fall into place.

Left to right, top to bottom:

1) Colour. This is the base texture. Pretty self-explainatory. Funny thing is, Max calls this map Diffuse, which is very misleading and can be confusing.

2) Bump. Kind of self-explainatory. Generally speaking, white is high and black is low, as is the case with this model. For example, the blood groove along the spine of the blade was added by painting on the bump map.

3) Diffuse. This is how much the surface scatters light. Umm... white will make it brighter, while black will make it darker. Kind of hard to explain. Again, Max confuses things by calling this map Diffusion.



4) Glossiness. This is kind of how shiny things are. A vase that has been glazed is pretty glossy, while a non-glazed vase isn't very glossy. Kind of like smoothness.

5) Specular Level. This is like Glossiness, but with regards to lighting only. If you look at a pool ball, not only will it be glossy, but the reflects from any lighting will be very defined. Basically the reflection from a light and the light only.

6) Specular Colour. This is the colour you see when specular kicks in. If the pool ball happens to be yellow, then the colour of the light's reflection will be yellow or yellow tinted. Know what I mean?

The result so far:



Still have a long ways to go, but I got a very fine start on the blade.

I did a test animation with a moving light and the way the light plays across the blade(s) is fantastic. It almost becomes a totally different monster depending on the lighting. Very cool.

Not only is painting the maps an art form, but getting the maps to play off of each other well is an art form - and I've still got a lot to learn about it.

There you have it. A small taste of painting textures for a 3d model.

play.fiddle.learn

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Did a little more painting and tossed together 200x200 samples from the maps. These samples are "life" size.

What these chunks represent on the model is the top part of the hand guard. Since the hand guard has some pretty gnarly angles, I tossed them onto a curved surface.

Samples are same order as the original post.



Here are two quick renders. One with two lights and the other with one light.



How would you describe the material? Walnutty? Beat up vener? I don't know, but it's cool.

I tell ya, I'm a pretty crappy painter compared to some folks I know, but knowing about different maps and using them certainly makes up for it. Can you believe a handful of crappy paintings made something that cool?

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That's impressive. Although, I can't tell what part of the weapon the details at the end of your post are from.

And the low poly count is really bugging me =)

It's the top part of the handguard. Pretty much where the top spike is.

Low poly? Yeah yeah.
Some day I'll rebuild it with NURBS and what-not. Put some cool junk in there, like a better handle with finger and palm depressions. Even have some chamfered edges. Ohhh... now that's high-tech.

The last render I showed, the one showing the detail better, is a geosphere that I scaled down on the z-axis. I did add MeshSmooth to it, but it didn't really do much, so I took it back out. However, it does look a little funny because it was painted for a box shape.