asterisk8
01-31-2004, 09:56 PM
i'm currently working on a game that requires modeling everything from space stations to sheep to robotic flying crows. it's my first foray into the world of texturing and skinning, after 8 years of webdesign/dev work and a lot of independent 2d art.
the one thing time and time again that was a huuuuge problem for me, one that took me a good six months to overcome, was getting sci fi and robotic models to look right. aztech patterns, metal plating, all that stuff is rather intricate, and i really had no idea how to go about it.
so this is for folks who just have no idea where to begin. it may not be the best technique or for everyone, but it's worked impossibly well for me, and i've cut down my time on those models from about a week to an hour. i tried to make the tutorial platform and program independent, so you'll need familiarity with the basic toolkit of your painting application to follow along.
1] metal plating appears to be randomized, but it's nearly always square-shaped. at first i tried just hand drawing all kinds of shapes and such, and it just wound up being doodley and lame looking. plus it was a lot of work.
far easier is to get yourself either a nice vague metal pic, or draw up a bit of metal...maybe some kind of black&white clouds filter, and even out the darkest and lightest points so it isn't *too* striking. noisify and blur to taste, etc.
next get your marquee tool, the square one, and keep making a bunch of random square shapes, adding to the selection each time you make a square. you can then go back and subtract a few squares from the selection for little cutaways and such. save your selection if your graphics prog allows it.
now invert the selection, and darken everything in the selection evenly (aka, no burn or contrast type brushes). don't make it too dark, just enuf to differentiate it from the non-selected bits. you can always go back and add a layer of black paint streaks with low opacity, or use something like the PS burn tool to give it a little more zazz later.
on a new layer, outline (or stroke for you photoshop folks) the selection with 1pixel of black. reduce the opacity so it's not too harsh, but just brings out the shape of the highlighted plating a bit more.
shade and highlight, add lil' dinks and dents, shade it, highlight it, etc.
gimp, photoshop and painter all have a "pattern brush" of sorts, so i then made all different colours and sizes (512, 256, 128, etc) for whatever models i'm working on. now i can just paint on my finished base texture, and concentrate on the details of the model rather than taking ages just to get a decent foundation going.
2] i liked the feeling of painting on finished components so much, i rigged it up so i have a pattern that's just a single white light. a pattern that's hazaard stripes. etc.
3] another technique that i coupled slightly with the marquee plating was to just draw some shapes in with my wacom, but my core advice, which i've learned time and time again when skinning, is don't be wimpy about it. bold, confident brushstrokes and tend to be the way to go. you can always soften the look of it later, but it just doesn't seem to translate the other way around. also, cross-hatching the shading a bit seems to work quite nicely.
anyway here's a composite of a few of the resulting models, as seen from our little in-house modeling converter, which is actually rather spiffy if i do say so. i rather like that they look kind of sketch bookish to a point; that's just a look i kind of dig, but i could see the technique being used in a more realistic fashion as well. it's a mmorpg sort of thing and we've got a low footprint requirement, so we've got to be a bit low-poly about it as well....
http://www.awayfromkeyboard.com/comp.jpg
yeh, all that to basicly tell you to use marquee tool :P
the one thing time and time again that was a huuuuge problem for me, one that took me a good six months to overcome, was getting sci fi and robotic models to look right. aztech patterns, metal plating, all that stuff is rather intricate, and i really had no idea how to go about it.
so this is for folks who just have no idea where to begin. it may not be the best technique or for everyone, but it's worked impossibly well for me, and i've cut down my time on those models from about a week to an hour. i tried to make the tutorial platform and program independent, so you'll need familiarity with the basic toolkit of your painting application to follow along.
1] metal plating appears to be randomized, but it's nearly always square-shaped. at first i tried just hand drawing all kinds of shapes and such, and it just wound up being doodley and lame looking. plus it was a lot of work.
far easier is to get yourself either a nice vague metal pic, or draw up a bit of metal...maybe some kind of black&white clouds filter, and even out the darkest and lightest points so it isn't *too* striking. noisify and blur to taste, etc.
next get your marquee tool, the square one, and keep making a bunch of random square shapes, adding to the selection each time you make a square. you can then go back and subtract a few squares from the selection for little cutaways and such. save your selection if your graphics prog allows it.
now invert the selection, and darken everything in the selection evenly (aka, no burn or contrast type brushes). don't make it too dark, just enuf to differentiate it from the non-selected bits. you can always go back and add a layer of black paint streaks with low opacity, or use something like the PS burn tool to give it a little more zazz later.
on a new layer, outline (or stroke for you photoshop folks) the selection with 1pixel of black. reduce the opacity so it's not too harsh, but just brings out the shape of the highlighted plating a bit more.
shade and highlight, add lil' dinks and dents, shade it, highlight it, etc.
gimp, photoshop and painter all have a "pattern brush" of sorts, so i then made all different colours and sizes (512, 256, 128, etc) for whatever models i'm working on. now i can just paint on my finished base texture, and concentrate on the details of the model rather than taking ages just to get a decent foundation going.
2] i liked the feeling of painting on finished components so much, i rigged it up so i have a pattern that's just a single white light. a pattern that's hazaard stripes. etc.
3] another technique that i coupled slightly with the marquee plating was to just draw some shapes in with my wacom, but my core advice, which i've learned time and time again when skinning, is don't be wimpy about it. bold, confident brushstrokes and tend to be the way to go. you can always soften the look of it later, but it just doesn't seem to translate the other way around. also, cross-hatching the shading a bit seems to work quite nicely.
anyway here's a composite of a few of the resulting models, as seen from our little in-house modeling converter, which is actually rather spiffy if i do say so. i rather like that they look kind of sketch bookish to a point; that's just a look i kind of dig, but i could see the technique being used in a more realistic fashion as well. it's a mmorpg sort of thing and we've got a low footprint requirement, so we've got to be a bit low-poly about it as well....
http://www.awayfromkeyboard.com/comp.jpg
yeh, all that to basicly tell you to use marquee tool :P