🧵 Low poly realism
Anonymous at Thu, 15 Aug 2024 03:16:23 UTC No. 992167
I'd like to know more about how artists back in the early 2000s used to texture. I've been trying to replicate the low poly realism style with no supporting maps except diffuse, normal maps and specular, since all of the detail is in the diffuse, and it's been somewhat difficult with moderate success. I can't really grasp my head around on how artists painted micro-detail with real-like visible skin detail down to every blood vessel, every pixel highlight of gloss and color variation. It's to me not the same workflow as when working with high poly, modern standard characters. My characters do not have the same depth, and look flatter in colors since it's inhumane for me to paint a pixel perfect realistic body by hand. Even using generators. I'm using Substance for texturing. Are there courses for something like that in the direction I could watch or some advice on how to utilize substance painter better or any of you guys could drop a hint on how to replicate a skin in something like pic related?
Anonymous at Thu, 15 Aug 2024 04:12:10 UTC No. 992168
>>992167
you paint in layers and rather than trying to mimic a surface spot by spot painting each pixel you come up with a process that imperialistically
capture the look of the surface and you layer it up. you over paint and use masks and blend to fade in and out and build up your skin til it starts to look right.
Pic related was a tutorial I made many years ago for my process of how to paint skin manually, I used photo sourced textures and painted over them with techniques
like this to paint in the missing details or enhance blend areas that didn't transfer well from the image source.
Anonymous at Thu, 15 Aug 2024 04:20:04 UTC No. 992169
>>992168
>impressionistically that is
🗑️ Anonymous at Thu, 15 Aug 2024 04:27:20 UTC No. 992171
>>992168
Thanks for the image, this was really helpful and cleared some things up. Can your workflow be executed in substance painter with that cell grain and rainbow noise? The UI of your thing looks much different.
Anonymous at Thu, 15 Aug 2024 04:33:41 UTC No. 992172
>>992171
I dunno, I'm a boomer who still use photoshop for everything image related.
Anonymous at Thu, 15 Aug 2024 04:35:04 UTC No. 992173
>>992168
Thanks for the image, much appreciated and it clears things up. I'll take a look asap.
Anonymous at Thu, 15 Aug 2024 07:55:35 UTC No. 992180
brain graft
Anonymous at Thu, 15 Aug 2024 15:46:29 UTC No. 992202
>>992167
Pic rel is some of my most recent "organic" work. I basically use the same maps as you except I use Height instead of Normal maps but it's more or less the same thing. I specifically took Fallout 3 (which as a reminder came out in 2008) as inspiration for the graphic fidelity I'm aiming towards as I believe that era of gaming struck the perfect balance between fidelity and effort + time needed
To answer your question, devs likely used Photoshop back then. Blender allows you to export the UV Layout of the meshes you unwrapped as a transparent PNG file: I do that, open the PNG file in Photoshop and create the texture from there, within Blender I then refresh the texture to see how it looks in my 3D viewport. Basically there's a lot of back and forth between the 2D and the 3D softwares of your choosing. Once I finish the Diffuse texture I run it through Materialize to generate Height and Roughness maps, and voila.
As for painting skin, I seriously doubt they handpainted it, not entirely anyway, it's more about taking images and blending them together by using layer blend modes (you know, Normal, Soft Light, Hard Light, Overlay, that kind of stuff). For example, if you look at the bones of my model, the texture I used as base for them was actually that of some ceramic tile, thus not having anything to do with bones, I then gave it a more "boney" look by playing around with the layer blend modes and opacity levels, blending the ceramic tile image with a simple beige flat color plane; lastly, I then took a flesh texture I found online and overlaid it on top of the bone texture I had already created to give the bones that "bloody" look.
This anon is pretty on the money >>992168
>tl;dr
To create textures, back in the day they likely used Photoshop, and they created textures by blending a whole bunch of images together by fiddling with layer blend modes and layer opacity levels