[ScoobyDoo]

This is my texture for the ever present explosive toxic barrels that seem to plague most recent video games.

Heres the texture,

and here's the texture mapped onto a surface


Please, let me know what you think, especially you guys that do textures for games currently, I'd like to know where I stand in terms of texture quality? Im looking for work.


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Scoobydoobydooooooo!

[This message has been edited by ScoobyDoo (edited August 27, 2000).]

[waylon]

Very nice. The metal looks very convincing, though depending on what game this is for, you might get into trouble adding lighting right onto the texture (since, if it's meant to be a stationary object, the engine will probably pre-calculate the lighting.) You probably already know this though.

As far as texture quality... it's pretty hard to judge from this one piece. It's not exactly the most difficult subject, but it looks to be professional quality. The one big question is: How long did you spend on the texture? Working professionally, something like this should take about an hour... maybe a little more if you don't already have a base metal texture to work from.

In any case, show us some more of your work! I dig your gallery on your web page, but as far as textures go, it's a bit.... sparse.

[MaLoRuM]

Hot dayum thats a nice texture, very nice quality, i love the ooze looks very 3d

only suggestion i would have is that maybe the barrel could have a few dents and dings in it. being that the top is obviously blown the hell off and green goop is oozing all over the place, maybe a lil dent or scratch here and there.

Otherwise thats the prettiest cleanest looking toxic goop barrel i've ever seen! very nice work mayan! berry berry nice!

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The Correct Procedure in The Art of the B*tch Slap: *Extend arm* *reel back* *twist torso* *stare opponent in eye* *twist back and release* :) *follow up with something cool to say*

[DuKEZ]

i dont remeber seeing this in any games? :P

[jason_watkins]

I'm no texture expert, but as a LD I can tell you what is good in textures I use.

First of all, this is great.. if you can pound out stuff of this quality over and over on request, you're ready to go pro... however, you'll need a prolific portlfolio before most game companies will look at you, since you haven't shipped.

The values get a little too dark. You need to think of textures as being what the object would look like when lit completely evenly with a soft diffuse light. Now, of course this contrasts with trying to get any sense of depth to a texture, so you have to pick a balance.. in this one, the darks are maybe a tad too dark, which could make it hard to use. You can see in your own rendering there that stuff is getting overblown highlights already. It's ok in that, since the rest of it has that very saturated aesthetic going on.. but in a game you want versitility, so stick closer to some middle values. This is a key difference between painting textures and doing illistrations.

Otherwise, doing great, just keep going, do lots more and throw it out for LD's to use in Quake3 or CounterStrike... if you make a texture pack that really rules and catches on, you'll have a much better time getting into companies.

[Gambit]

Hey, I like what you have here. Keep it up!



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Gamingvault.com

[Frost]

Hey Scooby!

It's good to see your interest in real-time 3d game art, very cool. =)

the texture seems fine, however, you should perhaps keep pre-lighting to a lesser level. For instance, we know that in most cases, the barrel will be on the ground and top-lit, therefore the rims are well lit and can be kept (although maybe toned down in contrast a bit). But the vertical lighting/shading is probably not a good idea, as a game engine will be lighting this object itself using (dynamic gouraud vertex lighting with) its geometry (because lighting will change depending on the location of the object, and how it interacts in a level, etc). Having preshaded or textured reflections or speculars is NOT a good idea. These can all be done in real-time by the game engine. Only add texture details for the simple things that the geometry doesn't take into account, like the rims, slime.

Hope this helps. =)
cheers

[ScoobyDoo]

Thanks for all the nice comments, I really appreciate it. Ive got many more textures/skins that Ive just never put online anywhere.

Harharhar...thats pretty funny/cool that the only problem anybody pointed out was something that I myself KNEW to be wrong!

I increased the contrast of the lighting layer I had applied to the texture for "presentation purposes" here on the forum, but I can see now that doing this was a mistake! I dont need to make the texture look nice for you guys, when your going to not only look at it asthetically, but also, technically.

One change I did make was that the ridges on the sides of the barrel are something I put into the texture, but is also expressed through the geometry, so I reduced the opacity of that layer. Frosts comment remided me of that.

Here it is, with the lighting reduced.

and applied


Ive got many more on the way.

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Scoobydoobydooooooo!

[waylon]

Your newer version looks much more realistic, and I like the lighting a lot better.

A couple little tricks to snazzy up the texture a little, though... (Hey, if this is going in your portfolio, you can spend the extra time on little details.)

First, most metal barrels will have a vertical seam, which tends to get a bit rusty. Same with the rim around the bottom - rust will creep upwards.

Second, like Malorum said, if this really WAS a leaky barrel of toxic waste, it would probably be in a little bit worse condition. Scratches, dings, and dirt spots would make it a bit more convincing. Subtlety is important, though.

Third, you still have the lighting information in the slime. It looks kinda funky.

Incidentally, I've had this picture laying around on my hard drive, and I thought it might make a useful reference pic. http://fear.incarnate.net/~vlad/sijun/barrels.jpg

And I still want to see more of your stuff!

[jason_watkins]

New version is quite a bit better, great work.

One thing I left out: 1-2 years from now, doing faked relief lighting in textures is not going to be common in gamedev anymore. Reason being that the hardware is quickly moving to programable shaders and specular lighting models. The current bumpmaping features available today are just the beginning of this, and real support won't come until it gets rolled into DirectX sometime next year (the OpenGL community is working on a similar mechanism).

So, what I'm trying to say is, concentrate on the basiscs. Do *lots* and *lots* of different surfaces. Experament with special accent bits like the sort of faces and trim patterns you find all over game geometry.

Work on making interchangable sets of textures. Stuff like 6 wall textures that can all tile horizontally with eachother in random order (this is one of the tricks that made halflife look so good while being so low detail).

Spend a little time checking out how to do skinning work. Spend a little time checking out how to make texture maps for 3d packages... not just color maps, specificly, other mapped effects.

Those sorts of skills are going to be more usefull over the next couple years.

[ScoobyDoo]

I already do skinning, and 3d modeling. Ive been doing textures and models for years.

Im 21 and have been tinkering with photoshop for nearly 8 years, and 3ds for almost 4 or 5.

Realtime graphics apps these days though are still rather limited, and if I want to get hired onto a company NOW I have to understand the limitations of todays hardware/software, and IMAGINE the innovations to come, and how to take advantage of them.

I love the Q3A Shaders, you can create a variety of great effects with them. Soon enough, the objects in 3D games will be textured with the same accuracy, and detail as one of my more typical 3ds Max scenes, full "metal" or "phong" shading, variations on specularity intensity, and size, etc.
HOWEVER! I dont want to be tied to having to use all of these "spiffy" effects.

I want to be able to create a pleasing scene with just some engine rendered radiosity for the walls, vertex lighting for the objects /characters, and some single-2d non animated or alpha blended textures.

Show that I can work within limitations, see?

As far as making maps for other than the color? Ive spent the last 2.5 years working as a graphic artist for a digital photo company, and have created HUNDREDS of 32bit, alpha blended digital photo templates, as well as a variety of color/specular/opacity/self-illum/reflect maps.

Though I can create these maps to a reasonable quality for 3d pre-rendered anim work, flaws in the textures can easily be working around when creating the anim. Not so with real time 3d, because the players have a tendancy to investigate anything and everything, expecially if it looks cool, so every texture must hold up under close scrutiny, and that is a skill Im attempting to improve. Maintaining quality in my skins/textures, but at the same time maintaining a consistant sytle and asthetic while at the same time, conserving time, and constraining myself to following the technical limitations of a realtime 3d engine.

Anyway, sorry for the length of the post, you will CERTAINLY find more textures and things coming from me very soon, as well as a couple 3d characters, fully concepted, modeled, animated, and skinned by yours truly.

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Scoobydoobydooooooo!

[jason_watkins]

Scooby: awsome man, sounds like you're right on track. So, full steam and don't worry about where you stand... if you're not *there* for a company, you will be soon, so no matter.

[Tinusch]

I wish games looked that good...

[black_fish]

I have to disagree with a lot of people here: it's GOOD to paint light and shadows on any texture, be it for a character or an environment. Realtime lighting in games is a dream; only very powerful 3D cards can do a good job at lighting and you need a lot of polygons to catch those lights and shadows. A barrel like you did would be probably roughly around 48 polygons in a realtime game, and wouldn't have enough details to be lighted properly by the game engine. You have to paint those lights and shadows. Look at any Quake texture map for a character (or the beautiful ones in Kingpin) and you'll see that they have very heavy shadows and highlights. You can compare them to the ones in Rainbow Six where the painted shadows are minimal and you'll see the difference.
And of course if you're working on Playstation you have NO lighting whatsoever, so you have to paint it or pray to have the programer waste precious engine ressources on the lighting.
Other than that if you want to work in the game industry, put up a good portfolio somewhere with a lot of quality stuff and maybe you could be noticed. But this is very difficult to find a job in the industry right now if you don't have previous experience.

For the other guys: can you tell me what kind of experience you have as game artists (on what game have you worked)? I hope that you're not giving advice without knowing what you're talking about.


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http://jmringuet.webjump.com

[waylon]

I guess I half way agree with you, black fish. It *IS* important to paint lighting onto your texture in a lot of circumstances. But what's even more important is knowing when to paint the shadows on, and when to leave them off.

Most 1st person shooters nowadays have light maps... all of the lighting information in the scene is pre-calculated, so there's not much game-time processor overhead. The VIS program can do an increadible job calculating highlights, radiosity, etc. If you have lighting already painted on an object (like the original barrel skin), it will conflict with what the level compiler chooses.

So like I said, I agree with you for the most part. Drawing lighting onto your texture IS incredibly important. But there's a limit to how much you can do before it starts conflicting with what's in the game engine.

[jason_watkins]

I worked on an indepentent sequal to a well known FPS, contracted by the publisher that owns the rights, liscencing the orignal developers tech. After the publisher was bought out by a certain large french company, project was cancelled. Which also wasn't surprising, the code was several months behind from people jumping ship.

You're right that fragment level lighting hasn't arrived yet in current engines(hardware). Not enough hardware is shipping with the features, and what is shipping isn't general enough to be useable. However, it's closer on the horizon than you might think. My worry was that if he was just getting started in this kind of work, he might punish himself a bit to much trying to get the same quality of releif lighting that legend and others get, when that's what I'd consider a dieing skill. Ends up he's a lot more prolific than I at first thought from his post, so no worries at all. But, certain fundamental skills, like say doing a marble or rock color pattern that doesn't look like crap when tiled, those will be useable skills until engines go full surface unique texture, which is a good bit further off.

Mark my words: by 2 years time, per fragment lighting will be as common in game engines as 16bit or better textures are now.

I personally feel the industry is a bit more open than you make it sound. Now, if you suck, you don't have a chance, but if you rule, your chances are good. You'll have to be willing to relocate. I've found most companies to be rather pragmatic... if they see good work, they'll get in bed... tho having shipped something of course makes you look a lot better .

waylon: totally agree, tho it's not vis.exe that does lighting ;P

[ScoobyDoo]

Jason, What game was that again?
I know to which publisher your referring, but not the game....?

quote:

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Originally posted by jason_watkins:
I personally feel the industry is a bit more open than you make it sound. Now, if you suck, you don't have a chance, but if you rule, your chances are good. You'll have to be willing to relocate. I've found most companies to be rather pragmatic... if they see good work, they'll get in bed... tho having shipped something of course makes you look a lot better .

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What do you mean exactly when you say "fragment lighting"?

What I was trying to determine from my posts here was which I fell into, the "sucks" or "rocks" catagory.

Anybody know of any companies hiring right now for a texture/conceptual/jack of all trades type position? I know that 3D Realms is hiring, but besides them?

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Scoobydoobydooooooo!

[black_fish]

I still can't agree with you guys, sorry.

ScoobyDoo go to the thread titled 'detail skinning ouch (help)' on this very forum to see some examples of very good textures. If you can do that you'll get hired. If you can't, forget it.