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Game Design Theory / Making Statues from Models

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Derek Darkly
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Location: Whats Our Vector, Victor?
Posted: 3rd Oct 2014 22:41 Edited at: 3rd Oct 2014 22:51
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Sounds easy enough... just slap a concrete texture on a model, right?
Well, no, that usually results in a total loss of detail.

I was playing around with Pixlr trying to see if I could make a decent statue texture out of pre-made color textures.

Here is the general technique I came up with, but it could do with a lot more experimentation:

(1) Save .DDS files to .PNG via DBPro (use full-quality load flag) and open in Pixlr
(2) Desaturate
(3) Add noise - (rough but still fairly visible)
(4) Gaussian Blur - (low end 11-20)
(5) Reduce contrast (about -70)
(6) Add noise again (balance between grainy and blurry)
(7) Emboss
(8) Blend Embossed & original (see opacity tool in "Layers" box)
(9) Save .PNG files back to .DDS files
(10) Retexture model or simply rename the new files as the originals

Here was the result of my first attempt:


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Van B
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Posted: 3rd Nov 2014 13:18
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Hmmmm, I'm not sure you'd want the red being darker than the rest of the texture. I think to make a good statue, you'd need to forget the original texture and rely on the sub materials like bump and normal map, and use a generic UV map with a marble or stone material. Then, bake the texture with Blender or something like that. The more the texture is baked, the more defined the shading will be, and it can even be manually adjusted to improve detail. But having the specular and normal map is vital - and they have to be good enough to stand on their own and not rely on the diffuse map. If anything, the diffuse map should be converted to a height or normal map and included to improve the detail.

Ideally, it's something that would be considered during the media creation process, and a shade layer for the model can be used rather than the colouring. I think that would give the best results.

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Derek Darkly
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Posted: 6th Nov 2014 22:50
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Quote: "Hmmmm, I'm not sure you'd want the red being darker than the rest of the texture. I think to make a good statue, you'd need to forget the original texture and rely on the sub materials like bump and normal map, and use a generic UV map with a marble or stone material."


Great idea!
I guess I could have reduced the contrast in my cheap texture, but probably at the expense of detail.

Noobish question... specular vs normal maps - they seem very similar, but obviously aren't. What can I keep in mind to define these clearly?

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Van B
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Posted: 15th Nov 2014 00:49
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Well I'm no expert, but I think specular maps act as a light multiplier, so if you wanted to say, highlight details, or make an area shiny, you'd have brighter pixels. I'd look into XNormal, it's a free model normal map tool, very popular with Cryengine and UnrealSDK users.

http://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx

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Derek Darkly
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Posted: 20th Nov 2014 00:21 Edited at: 14th Nov 2015 19:18
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Whoa man, that's impressive!

Q: What is xNormal?

A: xNormal is an application to generate normal / ambient occlusion / displacement maps. It can also project the texture of the highpoly model into the lowpoly mesh ( complete texture transfer, even with different topologies ).

It includes too an interactive 3D viewer ( with advanced shaders and realtime soft shadows / glow effect ), some Photoshop filters and importers/exporters for 3dsmax and Maya.

It supports high levels of parallelism using multicore/multithreading, distributed/parallel rendering, ray tracing and advanced GPGPU techniques.


Q: How much xNormal costs??

A: Absolutely nothing. It's free for any use, including commercial one. No price and no fees at all. If you like it, please, help us sending bugs/feedback, examples of your art or mention xNormal in your project.

Ok, there are officially too many free apps to keep up with!
However, I have an idea...

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Van B
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Posted: 20th Nov 2014 13:26
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Yeah, xNormal is pretty great - especially considering the monopoly that Autodesk have over all the good 3D software, and the price of some of it. That's something I hate about Cryengine, you pay peanuts to use a great engine, that requires thousands of pounds worth of software to use properly. I'm always looking for cheap options

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