If I may give my two cents, and no offense to your work intended, just some thoughts that hopefully will help you improve your work.
Leather looks fine, good work. But the metal kinda looks like it's made of hay, which doesn't make much sense. I guess you were going for a very scratched metal but it doesn't look good imo. First of all consider scale, the scratches are massively big and deep, I'd tone down the intensity of the normal significantly as well. Second, material definition, your specular map (normal map alpha) is black for this metal, you'd want the opposite, metals have specularity. If you could tweak the mesh to add enviroment mapping as well that can be a big improvement, but at the very least have some specularity.
Many times less is more, more variation and noise doesn't equal a more believable material or a better texture. For instance the seams in your texture are very noticiable with the pattern changing direction, same goes for where there's mirroring in the uvs. Scratches all over don't make a good texture, logical scratches and dents on edges, dirt on crevices , etc on top of a properly defined material would.
And finally, the normal map. I'd greatly recommend not doing what you have done. Keep vanilla normal and overlay detail on top (google overlay normal map for how to do that properly without killing the blue channel). Don't just run your texture through nvidia filter or crazybump or any of that. That is always going to be significantly inferior to a baked normal map (vanilla) for this type of assets. Upscale vanilla, smooth artifacts, overlay your detail on top at a reasonable intensity, that's what I'd recommend.
Many people do the normal map filter method in retextures and it's counterproductive. It is not by itself better than using the original normal in the large majority of cases, because the normal map does more things than surface detail. It results in all edges looking ultra sharp which is not realistic and feels like a ps2 game asset but with higher resolution. And also those filters are meant to take a height map (white=mountain, black = valley) and your diffuse map may not approximate that at all, so be very careful with those filters. In your case the scratches where white so the resulting normal map makes them look raised from the surface and it ends up looking like fur or hay (specularity being extremely low helps define it as hay as well)
exactly this...also thevanilla high res texture pack is pretty good on its own,in case you didnt know you can just rename and repace it for the clutter version.
Hey! Thanks for the long critic, I really appreciate both. I agree with most of it, you're both right. Thing is, I had to decide between hardcore realism and a more phantasy-like approach. The object is really small, so if I wanted to make something more realistic it would have ended as something not so impressive, I decided I wanted something more for screenshots (its small and no one will use it for more than lockpicking, and there it looks small too) And about the textures, yeah, it could be a lot better, the green decorations are tricky, and even after trying to stay close to the original limits, it ended with a few weird seams. Same ith the long part and the leather; the leather its some kind of cone that makes it weird to make it seamless, and the long part, when you open the texture file, its like 3 million parts and a few long, I dont know which part is the noticeable one, and making it seamless for such short parts would be a pain in the a*s. Thats basically it, its pretty tricky to work on sadly (at least for me at the moment) Thanks for the constructive critics.
Looks great, though this is one object that could use UV tweaking. I can see some pretty obvious seams there, probably not something that can be fixed with textures alone.
12 comments
Leather looks fine, good work. But the metal kinda looks like it's made of hay, which doesn't make much sense. I guess you were going for a very scratched metal but it doesn't look good imo.
First of all consider scale, the scratches are massively big and deep, I'd tone down the intensity of the normal significantly as well.
Second, material definition, your specular map (normal map alpha) is black for this metal, you'd want the opposite, metals have specularity. If you could tweak the mesh to add enviroment mapping as well that can be a big improvement, but at the very least have some specularity.
Many times less is more, more variation and noise doesn't equal a more believable material or a better texture. For instance the seams in your texture are very noticiable with the pattern changing direction, same goes for where there's mirroring in the uvs.
Scratches all over don't make a good texture, logical scratches and dents on edges, dirt on crevices , etc on top of a properly defined material would.
And finally, the normal map. I'd greatly recommend not doing what you have done. Keep vanilla normal and overlay detail on top (google overlay normal map for how to do that properly without killing the blue channel). Don't just run your texture through nvidia filter or crazybump or any of that. That is always going to be significantly inferior to a baked normal map (vanilla) for this type of assets. Upscale vanilla, smooth artifacts, overlay your detail on top at a reasonable intensity, that's what I'd recommend.
Many people do the normal map filter method in retextures and it's counterproductive. It is not by itself better than using the original normal in the large majority of cases, because the normal map does more things than surface detail. It results in all edges looking ultra sharp which is not realistic and feels like a ps2 game asset but with higher resolution. And also those filters are meant to take a height map (white=mountain, black = valley) and your diffuse map may not approximate that at all, so be very careful with those filters. In your case the scratches where white so the resulting normal map makes them look raised from the surface and it ends up looking like fur or hay (specularity being extremely low helps define it as hay as well)
Thanks for the long critic, I really appreciate both.
I agree with most of it, you're both right.
Thing is, I had to decide between hardcore realism and a more phantasy-like approach. The object is really small, so if I wanted to make something more realistic it would have ended as something not so impressive, I decided I wanted something more for screenshots (its small and no one will use it for more than lockpicking, and there it looks small too)
And about the textures, yeah, it could be a lot better, the green decorations are tricky, and even after trying to stay close to the original limits, it ended with a few weird seams. Same ith the long part and the leather; the leather its some kind of cone that makes it weird to make it seamless, and the long part, when you open the texture file, its like 3 million parts and a few long, I dont know which part is the noticeable one, and making it seamless for such short parts would be a pain in the a*s.
Thats basically it, its pretty tricky to work on sadly (at least for me at the moment)
Thanks for the constructive critics.
Looks great, though this is one object that could use UV tweaking. I can see some pretty obvious seams there, probably not something that can be fixed with textures alone.