🧵 Untitled Thread
Anonymous at Thu, 1 Aug 2024 20:44:36 UTC No. 991296
What would your process be to create textures like those? As I see it, it's layers upon layers, and of different size. The very start of it could be relatively small squarish seamless tiled texture of bark, the next step would be apply it to model, then go into handpainting and create new non-tiled texture on top to paint subtle shading lines, then create another layer for moss, and then yet another layer for decals. The problem is, I'm not sure how this all translates to modeling software like Blender for example. Have you ever seen any tutorials like this, is it even possible to have many layers of textures of different sizes, some of which are handpainted and cover the whole object while others are tiled and painted elsewhere like Krita? It all sounds to me like all those textures should have different UV-mappings to achieve efficient workflow. Is this even possible? If not, what is a more realistic way to do this?
Anonymous at Thu, 1 Aug 2024 21:41:35 UTC No. 991302
>>991296
Begone newfag WoW was created before you were born. Of course it’s like what you said, it’s supposed to run for windows vista.
Anonymous at Thu, 1 Aug 2024 21:43:32 UTC No. 991303
Lets say we made a 512x512 tiled bark texture and UV-projected tree model. Lets say we now made separate tiled 256 x 128 moss texture.
In Blender's shaders there are mix-shader/rgb nodes. If we mix those two textures using those nodes, how do we position moss to be precisely at the bottom of the tree?
If this is possible and sufficiently easy to tweak, then decals of arbitrary size should also be possible using the same approach.
Handpainted shading seems to also be possible using "add texture paint slot", not sure though.
If we use base tiled texture of small size for bark and UV-map model there, I'm not sure if handpainting will work fine with those UVs with larger texture for painted shading?
Anonymous at Thu, 1 Aug 2024 21:49:45 UTC No. 991306
>>991305
> I'm just asking how to create rich multilayered textures.
In a convenient and modular way, which also allows using both external graphic software and handpainting on top of model.
Anonymous at Thu, 1 Aug 2024 21:56:20 UTC No. 991307
>>991303
Hmm, another consideration, doing this with shader nodes will probably still require baking it all into a single texture before export,
because it will probably be incredibly painful to recreate those shaders with multiple textures in game engines.
All this still might be nice for a modular and fast workflow.
Anonymous at Thu, 1 Aug 2024 22:35:58 UTC No. 991313
>>991303
>>991307
You guys are dumb, just make the tree. The developers from the early days of WoW didn’t care and 20 years later games like Genshin Impact still use this trick. You’re overthinking on the basics.
Anonymous at Thu, 1 Aug 2024 22:38:28 UTC No. 991314
>>991296
Creating textures like those seen in World of Warcraft's environment assets involves several steps and techniques.
1. Create a Base Model:
Start with modeling the base geometry of the tree in Blender. Use reference images to get the proportions and shapes right.
2. Unwrap the UVs:
Unwrap your model's UVs to create a layout for texturing. You can use multiple UV maps for different parts of the model if needed. For example, one UV map for the bark and another for the leaves.
3. Create Base Textures:
Create a seamless tiled texture for the bark in an external software like Krita or Photoshop. This texture will be applied across the entire model using a UV map.
4. Apply Base Texture:
Import your base texture into Blender and apply it to your model using the appropriate UV map.
5. Hand-Paint Additional Details:
Use Blender's texture painting tools to add hand-painted details directly onto your model. This includes subtle shading, highlights, and other details that can't be achieved with a tiled texture alone.
6. Add Moss and Decals:
Create separate textures for moss and other decals. These can be hand-painted or created as seamless textures.
Use another UV map to apply these textures. You can use masks to control where these textures appear on your model.
7. Combine Textures Using Shaders:
Use Blender's node-based shader editor to combine your textures. You can blend them using different blending modes and masks. For example, you can use a mask to apply moss only in certain areas.
Layer the textures using mix nodes, where you can mix your base bark texture with hand-painted details, moss, and other decals.
8. Bake Textures (Optional):
If you need to optimize your model for real-time use (e.g., in a game engine), you can bake all the texture layers into a single texture map. This involves creating a new UV map and baking the combined texture details onto it.
Anonymous at Thu, 1 Aug 2024 22:48:28 UTC No. 991316
>>991296
The original game probably had texture painting done with (maxon) bodypaint 3d.
Anonymous at Thu, 1 Aug 2024 22:48:32 UTC No. 991317
>>991296
3 layers, AO, gradient bottom to top for the moss and handpainted bark, the leafs would be easier in a paint program like photoshop or krita.
> I'm not sure how this all translates to modeling software like Blender
that is done in 3dcoat or mudbox I think, yes you can try to replicate the workflow in blender with ucupaint, it has bake and all that, I never texture paint in blender but here you have a couple of tutorials, it is in the new extensions shit too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u51
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1d
Anonymous at Thu, 1 Aug 2024 23:05:04 UTC No. 991319
>>991296
I think hand-painting the bark wouldn't be a problem. Or nowadays, paint the grooves into a multires and back the results to the low poly.
Finish up in substance painter with AO, occlusion layers, maybe a stylized lighting layer to bake some subtle directional lighting directly to the diffuse.
I think the artist had good reference images and a high level of 2d art skill, which both help a ton.
What I'm more curious about is how to create the nice fluffy foliage. I assume with criss-crossed planes like you would use for grass, but it would be interesting to see a wireframe or even just a polycount for the leafy parts
Anonymous at Thu, 1 Aug 2024 23:13:05 UTC No. 991322
>>991319
If you have wow downloaded you can probably just grab the file and see how they did it.
People back in the day got banned because they used to replace game models with random shit. You could make ore nodes the size of mountains or even clip through the floor of AQ40 to skip straight to C'thun.
Anonymous at Fri, 2 Aug 2024 01:46:11 UTC No. 991335
>>991314
If I wanted to ask a fucking chatbot I'd do it myself. Fuck off with your ai garbage.
Anonymous at Fri, 2 Aug 2024 05:30:49 UTC No. 991354
>>991313
I'm trying different approaches, looking what level of flexibility and polycounts I get, and what I like more.
In terms of modelling I definitely prefer sculpting the base tree, branches themselves can be polymodeled or done using skin workflow, some of the branches better be sprites.
Texturing is rocket science though.
>>991316
>>991317
>>991319
Thanks, I will look into this, have no idea what half of this is. Substance painter seem expensive and complicated, not sure if I should consider it at this point, as I'm complete newbie.
Still wondering, if combining tiled textures and non-tiled handpainted textures on the same model is possible.
Also interesting question, if you can tile one texture in 2 dimensions, tile another texture in 1 dimension, and apply 3rd texture without any tiling at all.
>>991314
> How to do X, Y, Z?
> 1. Do X
> 2. Do Y
> 3. Do Z
But it actually said something useful. To use mask to control the moss. That's a nice idea.
That means moss can simply be another tiled texture just like the base one, but it will be only visible at the bottom because of mask.
Still leaves the question, how to align it.
> Use another UV map to apply these textures.
This might be easier than I thought:
https://blender.stackexchange.com/a
Anonymous at Fri, 2 Aug 2024 05:35:36 UTC No. 991355
>>991319
> What I'm more curious about is how to create the nice fluffy foliage. I assume with criss-crossed planes like you would use for grass, but it would be interesting to see a wireframe or even just a polycount for the leafy parts
Yeah, those criss-crossed planes seem the only thing in WoW modeling that doesn't change through decades. The only difference there is that now textures on those planes are more highres and there are more of those planes per model.
Anonymous at Fri, 2 Aug 2024 11:03:01 UTC No. 991368
>>991354
>Still wondering, if combining tiled textures and non-tiled handpainted textures on the same model is possible.
Yes, it's possible. First, this is very common in substance painter. Painting a triplanar tiling material or a projected decal onto the object, painting a mask to specify where it should be visible, and baking the result to the final diffuse map.
That's nice because at the end, the rendering is fast and efficient, just reading from a single texture (or set of textures for pbr)
You can approximate that in blender by using their stencil painting tools to paint a tiling texture or stamp decals in texture paint mode.
If you want to keep the textures separate and be procedural/non-destructive, you can also just create a material with triplanar (or whatever your preferred projection is) in blender based on worldspace coordinates, and again, probably the most natural way to control it would be with a mask
>if you can tile one texture in 2 dimensions, tile another texture in 1 dimension, and apply 3rd texture without any tiling at all.
yes you can
Anonymous at Fri, 2 Aug 2024 12:12:53 UTC No. 991370
>>991354
>>991368
>Texturing is rocket science
No it’s not, again with the overwhelming thinking of a background object that the WoW developers didn’t care enough about. This one dumb tree is repeated throughout the game at different angles. Just built the tree to look like a tree, normal people would not care about some dumb tree and nether would artist. What are you even trying to do, build a WoW clone or something?
Anonymous at Fri, 2 Aug 2024 12:25:27 UTC No. 991372
>>991317
>3 layers
Damn, that's it? A lot of stuff in Genshin has 6-14 layers.
Anonymous at Fri, 2 Aug 2024 13:22:38 UTC No. 991375
>>991305
The "leaves" here look like planes with some low res texture sprayed on top to me.
Anonymous at Fri, 2 Aug 2024 13:39:20 UTC No. 991376
>>991368
Thanks, looks like it's easier than I thought even in Blender. Going through stencil tutorials.
>>991375
That's exactly what they are. And leaves in OP are planes with high res texture sprayed on top. Here is my take on "lowres texture planes as leaves" approach.
Anonymous at Fri, 2 Aug 2024 15:03:31 UTC No. 991389
>>991376
You have to work more with references, you can use the skin modifier too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDX
Anonymous at Fri, 2 Aug 2024 16:56:03 UTC No. 991395
>>991389
Thanks, that's interesting, skin can be a nice starting point, and nobody prevents me from using sculpting after applying skin modifier.
If by any chance, anyone has good tutorials on drawing 2d bark textures, I would appreciate a lot.
I'm trying to replicate this video at the moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51w
I want something like this, but with explanations what is going on, which brushes are used and why.
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 02:51:22 UTC No. 991432
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 09:23:12 UTC No. 991444
>>991432
I would rate it maybe 4/10 personally, far from something I would really want to use in a project.
The one on video looks nice, but if you're not experienced artist/illustrator,
it's really hard to understand what is going on, because author decided to hide all UI and we can't see brushes and tool settings.
Drawing those is kinda obscure field, very little information online, I guess there's not much to do other than trying to reinvent the techniques on your own.
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 09:59:14 UTC No. 991445
>>991397
the main problem is all the long branches in the trunk, he should place them in the top half, he could use a couple of spheres to block the shape before placing them, it looks like a weird fir tree, it is a references problem, the flat shader doesn't help neither.
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 12:03:46 UTC No. 991450
>>991445
I will keep this in mind, but I'm mostly interested in weird fantasy trees and I guess it's ok if some of them make very little sense compared to real world trees.
That being said, it is a valid concern for me that not all trees should be like this because it would be boring, some trees will only have branches in top half etc.
What you describe is also kinda more functional, because it leaves more room to walk for player.
In WoW a lot of forests have giant trees where branches start way above player's head.
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 12:12:59 UTC No. 991451
>>991450
That’s how real trees work in real world. Again with the overthinking. Trees don’t grow exactly the same way, trees leafs are randomly grown. What you are trying to accomplish is not seen by human because such perfect tree doesn’t exist.
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 14:10:59 UTC No. 991454
>>991296
If you look at the guy's artstation, when he has sample tree textures, he uses one tiling texture for the regular trunk, and one root texture with where he just overpainted the first with moss towards the bottom. None of that fancy shader stuff, root polys use the root texture and regular trunk polys use the regular texture.
Texture's set up so that the darker trunk recesses are vertical in texture space so you can easily map it and just reuse textures with different trees basically like a trim sheet.
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 15:15:36 UTC No. 991458
>>991454
Where did you find it? The only picture with sample texture I found is this one, and I think this work uses different approach then the one in OP. In OP picture there is a tiling texture but it's very subtle, it just adds small vertical scratches basically, it's not aligned with geometry in any way because those lines are tiny and blurry. But those damn big shading lines where the tree twists are most likely different texture, and they aligned with geometry really well which makes it easy to assume it was handpainted. Anyway, what you described sounds like a totally reasonable approach for moss, it's just a bit less flexible/modular than to have moss on a separate texture.
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 16:07:22 UTC No. 991463
>>991458
>But those damn big shading lines where the tree twists are most likely different texture, and they aligned with geometry really well which makes it easy to assume it was handpainted
Nope, can garantee that if you load it in renderdoc or whatever is your ripper of choice you're gonna see them vertically aligned. They did it that way because that makes it easy to recycle the texture among multiple trees. As I said, just like trim sheets.
>just a bit less flexible/modular
Designed to work on machines that were considered toasters 10 years ago
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 16:07:53 UTC No. 991464
>>991459
And desu, this texture doesn't look very good on those small two trees in the middle. Those too-vertical shading lines make it look wrong. On big trees it's good though.
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 16:37:40 UTC No. 991471
>>991296
The trick to lowpoly foliage is hand edited normals to belie the shape and volume of each plane to not have it look like intersecting cards.
The popular script 'normal thief' vastly simplified the process by allowing you to copy normal of a proxy volume to a set of intersecting leaf cards.
If you're not doing edited normals you have to use another strat like billboards (oblivion for example)
pic related is a demo from polycount, read more about it here:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Foli
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 16:49:26 UTC No. 991476
>>991467
that's the ambient occlusion map, at least it looks like, yes you can hand paint that too.
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 18:15:53 UTC No. 991494
>>991458
>Couldnt find it
You couldn’t find the guy name Matthew Heyman who was part of WoW modeling team for several years? Are you trolling us.
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 18:36:21 UTC No. 991496
>>991494
I mean I opened his artstation and went through every page and there are no example textures mentioned in the post (bark + the same bark with moss).
https://www.artstation.com/mheyman
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 18:38:39 UTC No. 991497
>>991471
Thanks, that's really useful. I didn't even get to this part, had no idea it's so tricky even to light this foliage properly.
Anonymous at Sat, 3 Aug 2024 20:51:03 UTC No. 991502
>>991496
artstation is not the only place, read development stuff, watch it or other sources WoW wiki offers. Why are you youngsters this dumb at finding stuff.
Anonymous at Tue, 6 Aug 2024 14:52:45 UTC No. 991674
>>991467
That is done using vertex painting
Anonymous at Wed, 7 Aug 2024 18:55:24 UTC No. 991777
>>991674
Is is maybe done using vertex painting, but that's a good think to mention. Only recently I found out Blender has vertex painting tools in
sculpting mode.
To actually use it for more than some minor shading requires increasing geometry to cosmic polycounts though.
Anonymous at Fri, 9 Aug 2024 13:02:04 UTC No. 991899
>>991777
the only thing they need for in this instance IS shading, as all you'd be doing is applying some darker bluish grays to the mesh to add the shading in the grooves. it has plenty of geometry to do this perfectly, so I fail to see why you wouldn't just use the tool for the job rather than have a strictly bespoke texture you can't use across the rest of the mesh.
Anonymous at Fri, 9 Aug 2024 13:09:39 UTC No. 991901
>>991471
It's not per se just hand edited, but mostly telling the normals to all face one particular direction for lighting. most all grass cards in games use the same method of editing the normals to point straight up (or in a direction that will best work for the lighting of scenes, but usually straight up.) It makes the job pretty simple in theory, but the issue always ends up being the right card placements for the mesh to look right. I ran into similiar issues when attempting to make a type of pine tree that isn't normally attempted. I got it working, but it was remarkably difficult to get right.
It was also a nice example of how to use vertex normals to fake lighting, add shading where I want it without painting into the textures, etc.
Anonymous at Fri, 9 Aug 2024 18:45:22 UTC No. 991915
>>991901
With your pine that may work as it point's mostly up, for a volume of cards facing every which way the winning strategy is to have the normals point in the direction of surface if you imagined all the detacched cars to be a single hull. Scripts like 'normalthief' automates that for you setting the normals to point in the direction of a proxy object without any need to edit by hand, which could be super finicky if you have hundreds to thousands of cards on a highquality game asset.