My latest work (scifi textures 2.0) - scifi materials

[TWahl]

Been delving more into the leadwerks editor lately, been working on some scifi materials made from some work I did as part of a texture pack I made quite a while ago. Currently compiling a texture material pack of these for leadwerks which will be available on the steam workshop for an affordable price. Just wanted to post a some screenshots of a cool scene I made with them!  I also uploaded them to the leadwerks steam page.

let me know what you all think! I am still fairly new to the editor and my laptop computer is not that great (scene ran slow) but I am saving up for a new workstation machine to do more 3d asset work and top-notch game creation on (I am a broke senior engineering college student, haha).

 

Thanks guys and have a good day.

P.S. I also have a turbosquid page (most of my products are free now), the link is: https://www.turbosquid.com/Search/Artists/PancakeMan96

Not all of them are of the greatest quality, lol. I started 3d modeling quite some time ago as a hobby and picked up many skills over time. The first application I ever started out with was Milkshape 3d!

[TWahl]

Same scene, different textures and lighting.

Amazing how much you can change the feel of the same scene as before with just some texture and coloring tweaks.

I also turned off mipmap and texture compression in these for a more crisp look. For the record each texture is only 512 by 512 pixels wide and this scene is 99% made up of CSG brushes.

Currently in the process of compiling all the materials.

 

 

[TWahl]

Added some modified bloom and a little more pronounced volumetric lighting to the scene. I will probably be doing away with the lens flares since they are really overpowering and I cannot get a setting that does not look like a huge red hot blob on the screen when far away... which the bloom tends to eccentuate.

 

 

[Josh]

Looks great!  Would love to see those in the Workshop.

[TWahl]

Thanks Josh, I will have to get in touch with you when I am ready about selling the pack since I have no experience with steam workshop at all, haha. I have read the tutorials and get the general gist of things though and it doesn't seem so hard.

Thanks for all of the upvotes guys!

P.S. I cannot wait to see what you have in store for leadwerks 5!

[GSFC_1]

TWahl, This is great to see. I am currently heading down the path of building textures up in 3D Studio max and exporting thier templates to 4096x4096 size templates to export to VR. I started with 512x512 textures but the normal maps and some of the Diffuse started looking pretty choppy. But your results are pretty awesome. 

[TWahl]

I think I made these textures around 6 years ago so that kind of explains why they are a little smaller, haha. But they still look great to me, in fact this is the first time I have ever seen them inside a game engine.

As for workflow, when I made these I did not have access to a copy of 3ds max at the time so I manually drew heightmaps (think like nDo) and then ran them through xnormal to get normal, cavity, AO maps and created diffuse, speculars in photoshop.

Nowadays I use actual hard surface geometry baking as it tends to give better results and allows me to create more complex designs, not to mention more visual fidelity. And I also work in at least 2k resolution to give me a lot of room to draw some fine details on tiling textures.

Have you tried using xnormal for 3d bakes? Works great if you don't want to manually set up lights and whatnot for texture baking. The program has never failed me! what in particular do you mean by choppiness, apart from maybe a lower resolution?

Thanks

[GSFC_1]

Oh man, you are miles ahead of me. 

I am just diving into this as well. I am 10 year veteran of Aerospace and CAD model manipulation. We never have to model anything, its given to us, we drop good looking shaders on it and render it photoreal, but we are diving into this head first. 

So, I am a Game Engine Texture noob. I have just been playing with formats and resolutions. Clamping myself to 4096 x 4096 does great, but it is super duper overkill for one object. When i ran creat my normal maps in LEADWERKS, I think they look great, but am open to new avenues. I think I should have said in my original comment, "I'm impressed that you made 512x512 look so good, maybe 4096x4096 is not the correct approach and I should try your approach" 

I will jump on those software titles and see what I can get from them. Appreciate the intel my friend, keep the rad rollin'.

 

[TWahl]

Aha I am also pretty cad savvy myself, I took a lot of classes in high school and a couple college courses in cad, as well as a couple of jobs these last summers that gave me experience. I can relate to what you are talking about though!

Oh and I never took any of your first comment negatively, no need to worry

There are a lot of hard surface texturing tutorials that cover 3d modeling, baking and whatever to read or watch, ditto for Photoshop as well. Having a wacom tablet is also essential when painting diffuse maps (scratches, etc.).

4096 is good for extremely large environment objects and characters but the higher resolutions tend to have diminishing returns in terms of quality, if you compare them to lower resolution textures on the same size object. Maybe try 1024 and see how that goes? Resolution really depends on the application of your textures and many other factors as well, like how far away from the player they will be viewed from.

Just practice, practice, practice my man. There was a time I did not even understand UV mapping  

 

 

[Josh]

6 minutes ago, TWahl said:

4096 is good for extremely large environment objects and characters but the higher resolutions tend to have diminishing returns in terms of quality, if you compare them to lower resolution textures on the same size object. Maybe try 1024 and see how that goes? Resolution really depends on the application of your textures and many other factors as well, like how far away from the player they will be viewed from.

In VR, you actually would want 4096x4096 for something like that.  Everything tends to look like a cardboard box with a low-res poster pasted on it if you don't.

[TWahl]

I see... That actually makes a lot of sense! I have no experience developing for vr so I would not know that lol. Thanks for that interesting bit josh!

[TWahl]

Hey again guys, nearly done with this little project. I found some scifi models that I will be adding to the pack to sell as well so I am currently in the process of getting them scaled properly and put into leadwerks.

In the meantime, here is a little work in progress shot of another test scene I created. This one is not super perfect as I kind of whipped it up really quick to test some concepts (lighting needs some work and it is a little empty, etc).

Thanks for the support!

 

[TWahl]

Was very happy with this scene, an adaption from the previous screenshots. I haven't had time to progress on the model conversion yet today since I had some long shifts at work but I really liked these shots so I thought I would show them.

The cords are from the leadwerks scifi pack on steam that have my materials on them. I will probably model some new ones of my own and add them to the pack. After some thinking I will probably release the models separately as well - at a price that is cheaper than the materials pack.

Again, these scenes are composed almost entirely of csg brushes!

Have a good one folks.

[Josh]

Really nice!  It's amazing what a difference a proper color palette with opposing colors makes.

I recommend disabling shadows on the lower lights, since they are so small and numerous.

[TWahl]

Thanks Josh! I thought the same thing. I also took your advice and turned shadows off for those lights - it did nor really make any difference in the visual fidelity at all.

Nothing too much to report today other than I worked on the same "mining station hallway" scene. Not a fan of the orange light in the middle, will probably change that up.

Tonight I found a lot of other un-textured height maps on my old laptop that I also created some years ago which I will bring to life in this pack. Right now there are around 30 or so materials included in this - by the time I am finished we will probably be looking at something close to 50+. I am also working on creating some more variants of existing textures - textures with different colors of paint on them, different tints, etc to add even more versatility.

So the release date will be postponed a bit, but hopefully I should have this thing wrapped up by the end of June. Right now I am undecided on price but when I am finished I will have a better idea to judge what value I am willing to sell this for. I also have to create thumbnails and stuff as well, for when I upload the files, but this is not too difficult of a task.

Thanks guys and enjoy a bit more eye candy! Feel free to ask me any questions about anything.

[Josh]

I really like the exposed rock / metal wall contrast.  Yeah, the orange light doesn't look right.

[TWahl]

Work has been progressing on some of the newer textures - I have about 25 new height maps created so far today and rendered all of the respective AO maps, etc. in xnormal.

Since I am creating some new textures I might go ahead and recolor most of the older ones, so the color palette over all of them is unified. This may allow me to generate some "cleaner" versions of the textures, allowing even more versatility and variation within them. The same general color palette is going to stay however so don't expect any super drastic changes, more of a quality refinement.

This most likely means that the release date will be postponed just a tad, depending on how speedy I am, but I feel this would lead to a greater amount of possibilities for creations. I also have areas on some of the older textures I made that could use some more details. My workflow for this will be to create a template .psd in photoshop which I can use as a master to speed the process up quite a bit.

I will essentially be doubling the amount of available unique textures before I even create different variants of each one! You guys will be in for a treat.

Have a good day guys!

[TWahl]

Here is a little sneak peek of my progress:

Thanks

[AggrorJorn]

Gorgeous work.

[TWahl]

So far I have created around 90 unique texture maps, I still have not started the painting process yet but that should hopefully come next week. I have also been learning Maya LT lately as well so I am thinking when that is done I might do some modular sets that work with the LE editor grid.

Still busy...

TWahl

[TWahl]

Was lucky to find some more (good quality) textures on an old hard drive of mine today. Here is a peek of one of them  I have since made it seamless along with its respective maps.

 

[TWahl]

Alright, so here are what the final numbers are going to be. I have not started making the diffuse maps yet but I am getting close. Just need to wrap up this phase of the process soon and I will be good to go.

These reflect the amount of unique textures and not their variations:

42 wall textures up to 2K resolution. with most being 512 and 1k

48 floor textures from 512 to 1k

30 or so miscellaneous/trim textures (do not know the exact number currently). Most of them are strip textures or are textures from 512 to 1k

 

so that is around 120+ unique texture maps that will be in this pack (again before the minor variants are factored in)

This will be a huge undertaking for me and I think I am going to take a small break once I finish making my curvature maps to catch up on some other things, however I am very committed to getting this done. So far I estimate to have close to 50 hours sunk into this project and there will likely be many more to come, but it will be worth it.

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My goal for this package now is to create a toolkit for making realistic scifi environments, and as I mentioned I will also be making some modular wall pieces that will fit the textures as well as some trims and pipes and whatnot to supplement your scenes. I also aim to create a few doors as well and include various sound files. Decals such as oil, blood, dust and alien growth will also be included.

I have also done some thinking and since there is going to be so much content, I will release 4 different versions that will cater to different project sizes:

1. Silver pack - this is going to be a very basic pack that will be free of charge, almost a "demo" that will include only a limited select number of assets within it. Sound files will be included and so will a few 3d models and assets, but my aim for this version is to make lite pack for those who are interested but do not want to fork over a lot of money at once at the risk of not liking the pack in the end or it not suiting their project needs. An example scene will be included. 1k textures will likely be the max resolution and there will only be around 10 texture maps, give or take.

2. Gold pack - A middle ground between the silver pack and the platinum pack - which means that around 50% of the assets will be included. Fairly self explanatory and should appeal to those who do not need so much content for a project.

3 Platinum Pack - This includes everything and will be the most expensive. On top of this I will be including the original .PSD images so you are free to tweak and create your own variants to suit your needs. This will contain the most 3d assets and sound files as well and multiple example scenes.

 

I know this is a big update but I just wanted to key you guys in on what is going on so far! I cannot wait until this is done.

Until my next entry, enjoy a 1k texture I have already made:

[Josh]

I really like the style.  Hopefully the above image has baked lighting, because you wouldn't actually want the diffuse map to have that kind of shading.

[TWahl]

It does have baked lighting, I did a quick bump map filter to accentuate detail not in the final product

[Josh]

If you add an emission map, that little light in the middle will light up.