Creating Stylised Textures for 3D

Texture artist Antonio Neves shared some of his thoughts on creation of stylised textures for your games. If you are working with some kind of Warcraft-inspired games, this could be great technique for you. Antonio’s work look amazing!

Introduction

Well, I came from Brazil, and I’m still living here, my speciality is handpainted textures, and I study everyday to improve my skills. In my history there is no big clients or big companies, maybe the biggest client that I worked on is Bitgem. I’m working in my home as a freelancer, I’ve been doing this for about two years, this is not too much and I have many things to learn yet.

Hand Painted Stylized Materials

The main reason why I like this style handpainted is because it’s so unique, we can see many artists doing their textures, but everyone have your own style, that is why I like it. It’s not surprise if I tell you that I started to like the style because of Blizzard company, they have excellent artists, it’s a inspiration for me. I think this style remains so popular because we have too realistic games and sometimes we want to see something without this feeling, the real life feeling. I believe the handpainted style bring us to a different artistic way to see the world.

Production

It’s more simple than you think, it’s just a default material with a diffuse texture, the most of the work I use Photoshop, but sometimes I need 3DCoat, that is all, the material is just a painting. It’s diffuse only.

There are different ways to use handpainted textures, you can use sculpt to help on the paint, you can use some maps from sculpt to help on the final visual, etc… So it depends of the way you are using it, for exemple, if you need to paint a texture floor diffuse only, you should not have to paint the light coming from one direction, because this kind of texture is not dynamic. In this case you paint the light coming from the top, used in many ways. I’m not a developer to say what  that really needs, but in general , the ones looking for this kind of texture, wants something more unique for the game. These are the great solution for stylised games, because you can paint everything, exactly what you want, it’s fast and unique. How do I keep that feeling on materials? I don’t know, I just try to go ahead improving my knowledge, trying to do something better.

I believe, to do some material, you need to know what you are doing, I mean, try to touching the material in the real life, and feel that. Of course we don’t have all materials available to have this contact, but it helps to understand the surface, the light, that sort of things. About the color, if you observe in the real materials we have more than one color composing a material, it’s very important to paint a textures, a rock is not completely gray or a wood is not completely brown, it’s something interesting to pay attention to. About my style, I don’t need to make it fell real, this is not what I want, I don’t want to do something real, I just want to do something that looks like natural, readable and unique, this is what I try to do.

The Scale

It’s interesting to talk about scale, you don’t have to think about one single object, but about the whole thing working together. The scale and the texture is two things that need to work together. Generally, I do some textures to work just for one specific object, but sometimes we need to do a texture to use for many objects.

Timing

I believe it’s depends of what kind of material you are creating, for some tileable texture it takes about fours hours. I use two softwares to paint – Photoshop and 3DCoat.

Antonio Neves, 3D/Texture Artist – Prop/Environment

INTERESTING LINKS

BLIZZARD’S ARTIST TUTORIAL ON BUILDING CHARACTERS FOR GAMES

UNUSUAL WAY OF 3D MODEL CREATION

BLIZZARD ART PHILOSOPHY