Texturing - Siege Of Orgrimmar - World Of Warcraft

[JohnYip]

Very cool thanks for sharing your process!

[victorfornes]

I will enjoy your work playing there ,as I enjoy seeing it. Amazing art.

[SteveTalkowski]

Gorgeous work! A few questions:

Are you using trim dymanics to blunt those edges? I like the uniformity you’re achieving here. How high is your polycount for those cracks? Also, are you doing any polypaint, or, are you using normal/displacement map in Photoshop to generate them?

Really digging this particular sculpt! How many subTools is it comprised of, and how many polys? Do you retopologize at all, or simply do a high-rez version knowing that you’ll be baking out normal/displacement maps?

You wouldn’t happen to have any progress recordings of this (or similar) work you can share with us?

Again, very nice work!

Thanks,

-Steve

[SPipes]

These look fantastic! I love how stylized it is, and how you used the rendered elements to push it even further. I’m very curious about how you were able to make tiling textures with a zbrush sculpt, though! What sorcery is this?

[carlobarley]

wow thanks for sharing!
quick question good sir!
what matcaps are you using to composite these badboys

[FAFF]

Hi guys !

Thank you for all your comments, it’s really appreciated !
I will try to answer to all your questions with the best I can with my crappy english !
I would like to say, I did a tutorial for the next Vertex magazine and I invite you to look at it when it will be released ! You can also look at the first one to see some very useful tutorials for free !
http://www.artbypapercut.com/

Cool. How did you place the rocks on the plane? Doesn’t look like the 2.5D Canvas to me. More like a collection of subtools that you sent to xNormal.
Did you use the Insert Mesh brush with a wrap modifier on that plane?

Effectively, it’s not a 2.5 D canvas. I created three different rocks in Zbrush and I decimated them. Then, I composited everything in 3dsmax.
In this way, I can easily work on my tile and send everything in xnormal to bake.

This is some really fantastic work. Love the texturing, and the process sounds really interesting. I’m guessing that you combine the final textures in photoshop. How do you use the normal map channels as far as layering them on the texture? Do you just paint in areas using blending options? Again, freaking great stuff.

We can’t use normal maps in Wow but there is some very useful information on it though !
I use the different channels of the normal map (green, blue and red) to add some lighting information on my texture. You can also generate a cavity map from the normal map to add cavities and highlights. Each texture is different, but I generally colorized one or more channels to add some colored lights on my texture. I invite you to see my tutorial for more explanations

Awesome work! I guess going through this process with sculpting out everything must mean that you have a huge amount of 3D assets at Blizzard that have never seen the light of day as 3D objects? Is this to be able to “future secure” your work?

Is the strategy to be able to generate even higher rez textures or reusing assets for new games? Do all texture artist and modelers follow this workflow, or has every artist their own process?

Asset management must be a big hurdle, knowing what is what, what is in the game, what model generated what map etc. All these questions

Anyway, everything looks amazing, also the stuff on your site.

That is true I have some Zbrush highpolys I did for the Wow textures that won’t be released as 3D objects. But it wasn’t my purpose anyway.
I knew since the beginning, they were for texturing, so I didn’t push as far as I could the sculpture sometimes or didn’t pay really attention to the tilling because I could change it in Photoshop after.
So it’s not a strategy at all, and what I did for Wow will stay only for Wow as texturing process. The Wow character team already used Zbrush to create their models and more and more environment artists start to use Zbrush at Blizzard.

Gorgeous work! A few questions:
Are you using trim dymanics to blunt those edges? I like the uniformity you’re achieving here. How high is your polycount for those cracks? Also, are you doing any polypaint, or, are you using normal/displacement map in Photoshop to generate them?
Really digging this particular sculpt! How many subTools is it comprised of, and how many polys? Do you retopologize at all, or simply do a high-rez version knowing that you’ll be baking out normal/displacement maps?
You wouldn’t happen to have any progress recordings of this (or similar) work you can share with us?

Again, very nice work!

Thanks,

-Steve

Actually I use the flatten brush a lot. I used to change to brush modifier to -100 on it but since the last version of Zbrush, it’s already done by default.
I don’t use any normal or displacement map from photoshop to create my sculpture, just a lot of custom brushes and custom alphas and I invite you to create yours !
And I don’t use polypaint at all.

These look fantastic! I love how stylized it is, and how you used the rendered elements to push it even further. I’m very curious about how you were able to make tiling textures with a zbrush sculpt, though! What sorcery is this?

wow thanks for sharing!
quick question good sir!
what matcaps are you using to composite these badboys

For all your other questions I invite you to look at my tutorial to see in details my process

Thank you a lot !

[Khuslen]

@FAFF
Thank you very much for sharing these beautiful works!

[carlobarley]

Yeah I checked out your breakdown very awesome stuff! its really inspiring, any chance youll give out the names of the matcaps or are those custom ones youve made yourself? I also see you composite RGB channels of a tangent space normal map, probably overlaying/softlight on top of your diffuse, every try baking out an Object space normal map?, the RGB channels can also give out awesome lighting info

[MyPeople]

really fantastic stuff. love the sculpts and love the texturing. along with everyone else-

MATCAPS Please???

[sylensJMK]

I love how clean the works are done…so flawless…simply amazing and quite pleasant to watch

[magicmodel]

You have a great eye for detail and randomness. Has inspired me to go out and buy the game now…or download it!

[DiederikV]

Amazing

[MarcSper]

Effectively, it’s not a 2.5 D canvas. I created three different rocks in Zbrush and I decimated them. Then, I composited everything in 3dsmax.
In this way, I can easily work on my tile and send everything in xnormal to bake.

I just tried to use an IMM with wrap mode set to 2 on a plane. Sadly it seems like IMM brushes ignore that setting. Would have been cool to use them for this purpose though.

[UlisesVirgen]

Great stuff!

[VisceralD]

What kind of brushes do you commonly use as part of your workflow

[schwertfisch]

Congratulations on your great skill and technique Michael. I’d like to say that your stylized type of rocks/metals and environment in general is my favorite and I believe that you do it really good.

After reading this thread and your tutorial in VERTEX, I’m left with one big question: since you decimated the rocks (as you mention in your post #26 of this thread) hence losing the uv coordinates, how do you apply the textures that are derived from the normal map channels? This technique sounds (and looks) brilliant, but I don’t quite get this part of your pipeline.

Thanks for your posts, they are a huge inspiration and big help to the 3d community!

[thomas.datoussaid]

Hello Fanny,

Thanks for sharing !

That will help me, as I’m studying graphic desing(In video game in Belgium) and I also use Xnormal and Zbrush, but not to make tiling textures .

But I don’t find you tutorial. I suppose it 'll be in the second Vertex?

Thanks again, really good job.

[FAFF]

Hello guys !

Sorry for the extremely late reply !

I generaly used the “flatten” brush (my favorite), “trim front” brush, “orb” brush and some custom brushes to do my scultptures.
For the matcaps, I really like the matcap called “White”. I also use the default red wax mat cap but in grey. (actually I sculpt with this one)
And I use several other custom ones to push cavities, highlights or ambient occlusion for example. I changed my matcaps regarding which materials it’s gonna be on my texture. (metal, stone, wood …)

I explained pretty much everything of my process in the tutorial for the next Vertex Magazine (n°2) but unfortunately it’s not released yet.

@schwertfisch : I’m very honored you think I’m Michael Vicente (Orb) but i’m not actually But thank you, I take that like a compliment ! xD

Thank you for all your comments !

[FAFF]

Hello guys !
This is some textures I did for the new WOW expansion, Warlords of Draenor.
I was more a modeler than a texture artist on this one so I don’t have a lot of textures to show unfortunately.
I hope you will enjoy it !
You can see more of my work on my website : http://fafart.blogspot.com/p/warlords-of-draenor.html

Attachments

[overmind82]

Hi***65281;this’s so cool!!! I so like blizzard art and this process ! I want more!