Texture files, normal map, specular....

Hello,

I have some questions, not sure it's the good place for them but I'll ask anyways.

I like hand painting so I prefer to paint myself rather than baking maps and use them to paint but sometimes for bigger models the image can't handle the details without pixellisation. Is it common to have multiple texture files for one object ?

Other question, is there normal map applied to hand painting models or does the paint itself enough ? Same for specular ?

Thanks

Jeremy

  • Kent Trammell replied

    I've heard for huge VFX productions (Lord of the Rings, Transformers, etc) it's common for models to feature many hi-res textures per model. But I've never done that personally. For one texture space per character, I'll typically go as high as 4K texture resolution (4096 x 4096 pixels). I think 8K (8192 x 8192 pixels) is possible and workable with Blender...though never tried it I don't think.

    Often my character models are broken into multiple objects (body, clothing, sword, shoes, etc) and it's not uncommon to do individual textures for each object, which is kinda like multiple textures per character.

    I was told that the rule for texture resolution is to double the resolution of the final output of the project. For example, if I'm making a short film at 1920 x 1080 (1080p), my models' texture resolutions should be 4K (double the highest dimension in output format).

    My brother works for Hi-Rez Game Studio (Smite, Paladins) and they use normal maps with hand-painted textures.

  • Jeremy Pouillot(dieedi) replied

    Hey thanks for the answer and the small tip on game studio :D

    I've play Hob to have a look at the gameplay and relaunched it to check how texturing is done, and I was surprised to saw the so simple texture (I, find it simple) with only some tiled textures representing the aspect of object (wall is gray with some darker shapes of 'bricks', same for grass) it should really depend on the game design of course. But it's a matter of what is to texture, which amount of details we want (I try to add a lot of details on my hand painted tests) etc... I really like it but I should take a further look on the sculpt/bake/retopo process.