isaiah658 wrote: ↑Sat Dec 12, 2020 17:02
Now for the textures I have not released yet and would like your thoughts on. I took a before and after screenshot of the metal blocks and ice. I accidentally included bronze in the screenshots twice. Let me know what you think. The ice still has lines because I don't really know any other way to make something look icy. They are more subtle though. If you know of any other examples that don't use the lines, let me know.
The "after" textures are actually a downgrade. Just adding blur and lowering contrast isn't how you improve a tile. There's nothing wrong with using a band highlight, as long as you do it right.
Here's some hints:
● Work on many tiles in a single file, so that you can make sure they fit one another. An easy way to make things consistent is to make them share a palette. You want all your tiles to look like they've been "snapped" in the same light conditions.
● Try to use a tiled preview when you work on a tile, if it's available.
● Work on tiles incrementally, first try to get the whole material right, then fill in the details.
● Any kind of specular highlight, including diagonal bands, must match the roughness of the material it's supposed to represent. Smooth materials will have thinner and brighter highlights, rougher ones will be more gradual.
● Metal mostly reflects light, it doesn't diffuse much. Without reflected light, the color of metal would be close to black, so all you see is a reflection of the environment. Metallic materials always tint what they reflect with their own color, a colored metal will never reflect pure white.
● Ice is much different. It's translucent, that is, it scatters and transmits light. It doesn't have its own color, because it's just water, and because it's not a metal, it reflects quite weakly even when polished. Any color that ice is gonna reflect will be borrowed from its surroundings, so it will mostly take on the sky's color -
but less saturated. Specular reflections on ice, however, will not be tinted like they would be on metal, they're gonna be the same color as they came in.
Also, unless it's precisely cut and polished, ice is gonna be a little wavy, and have scratches and cracks all over it.
● Details and structure can provide visual hints about a material even if you can't exactly reproduce its look. Rivets and other structures can make sure that something is made out of metal, while scratches and cracks can differentiate ice from something like glass. A bit of noise in general can help things look less sterile.
● If you want something to look very smooth and polished, you can try to give it a darker color with highlighted edges. This of course works only if there are some edges to do this with, it won't do for a repeating tile like terrain.
● Put some effort into building your palettes. Don't just settle for one hue, you can change the hue together with luminance to make it less bland. Don't just hue-shift one tile to make another, either - work on each variant individually to make sure that it actually looks like the material you want.
The provided example art is licensed under CC-0.
The attachment limit is kinda silly. I can upload 3 images 1MB each but not a few extra tile examples adding up to less than 20 kB.