My First 3D / Texture Project

[leigh]

Eeek, H-scroll break. In future, please use a smaller image if you're going to insert images directly into your post (rather link to a larger one with a text link).

Onto your actual post - firstly, are you aiming to work in games, or in TV/film? Having some knowledge of modelling definitely helps, as indeed it helps to have knowledge of any other part of the process. The core skills a texture artist should have are simply the ability to manipulate photos, to have a good sense of colour, and to be able to put together textures that work properly and look the way they're supposed to, heh.

I only have a few minutes so I'll post a few bullet points of feedback.

- Your textures overall look a little low res. Ensure you have enough resolution to get the right amount of detail and clarity in.

- The scale of some of your details looks incorrect, in particular the brick wall in the foreground. Look at a brick wall in real life, and you'll see that a single storey of a building has a lot more bricks than your texture suggests. Getting the scale of your details correct is essential for conveying the overall scale of the scene. Having details that are scaled too large in your textures makes the scene look miniature. This is a very common mistake made by beginners, so don't feel too bad about it! Your brick wall in the background has a much better scale.

- Some of your textures are very saturated. Over-saturation also tends to make things look a bit miniature, and also makes things look a tad cartoonish and unrealistic.

- Remove cast shadows and highlights from textures. The bricks you've used, for example, have shadows on them which make the wall look extremely fake.

- It's great that you've put dirt in your textures, but avoid making the dirt very large. Look at real life surfaces, and you'll see that most dirt is quite small and confined to corners and such. Adding large blobs of noisy dirt details to surfaces takes away their realism. As a guide, your barrels have good details on them, your foreground walls do not.

- Avoid using white. It doesn't really occur much in real life ;-) Likewise, avoid pure blacks. In fact, avoid any large area of single colour. Real life surfaces have constant variations.

- Some of your textures are a little unrecognisable. For example, you have some panel details on your foreground walls on the left that I am assuming are wood, but it's not clear from the texture.

- In your UV layouts, maintain a proportionate scale in your shells. That is, don't have the shell for your barrel the same size as the shell for a wall. This ensures a constant textural scale, in terms of clarity and detail of the images themselves.

[Possessed-Rabbit]

Apologies for the h-scroll break, I was hoping this forum had image resizing integrated, my b! Fixed...

Addressing your question: I would love to work in video games, that in my primary goal. I like to study environments and fine details, I would like to give characters a chance eventually, but I feel stronger towards environments at this stage.

I noted all your other suggestions, thanks for contributing... time constraints really put a damper on the amount of detail I could put in, so it slowly evolved into a sort of cartoonish rendition of a modern day scene.

One of the things I'm really looking forward to is learning different mapping techniques, I currently only know of creating a single layer map for every model.

Every element had it's own high quality texture map, the image with the combined maps was merged together as an example of the different textures I created, I have yet to learn how to combine multiple objects together on 1 map.

Thanks again! Your tips are inspiring...

EDIT: Another question I had; is it better to do a bunch of small pieces to better represent your abilities or have a couple decent scenes?

[leigh]

Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. The more variety you can show in your portfolio, the better. It shows that you're not a one trick pony.

What software are you using? If you're using Maya, you can easily combine multiple objects on a single map by applying a single shader to them all, and by laying out all their UVs together in a single template. Just select all the objects together and you'll be able to arrange all their UVs in a single 0-1 layout.

[Possessed-Rabbit]

I'm using 3Ds Max, I suppose it'd be wise to learn Maya sooner or later though...

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