Thais Del Rey shared a detailed breakdown of her stylized diorama inspired by WoW. The second part focuses on texturing, painting, lighting, and presentation.
Now, it’s time for the fun part! Texturing is a really important and defining step when it comes to the hand-painted style since the majority of the details is painted manually. This is also the part that I like to experiment a lot in and use different workflows and tools to get some interesting results. With that being said, I will go over a few different techniques and tips I like to use to speed up my process. However, I do want to state that learning how to manually paint is still the most crucial skill for that style and no amount of short cuts will substitute the need for learning and understanding that.
What I like to do is to quickly create a procedural base that I can use to paint over some finer details.
We are going to get that base by blending different maps together to build up some values and colors. First, you can get those maps by baking your high poly detail into your texture sheets in any baker of your preference (my favorite is Marmoset Toolbag’s Baker since it’s much cleaner and faster). We will need the Ambient Occlusion, World Space normal, Curvature (or concavity and convexity), Position and Thickness map. Depending on the baker, the map names may vary but the overall concept is still the same. I will do a breakdown of what each map can be used for in terms of stylized texturing purposes but if you want to learn more technical information about the maps, check out this source.
Now that you know what each map can be used for, we can get a nice paintable base by blending the maps with different layer’s blending modes. I will use Photoshop to explain the process and then move on to other programs like Substance Designer and Substance Painter.
If you look at how the layer types in Photoshop are organized, you will have a clue about what each one of them does.
Now you can use those blending modes to get a base that has nice values and then color it with a gradient map adjustment. My most used blending modes are Multiply, Color Dodge, Overlay, Soft light, and Hard light. Also, I use the opacity slider to change the intensity of each layer. You can approach this in two ways:
Now that you know the overall approach to procedural hand-painted textures, you can use this information to expand and experiment with different tools and workflows.
Substance Painter can be very useful in this process because you can build a smart material that will help you get a base really quickly by applying the same layer and blending modes the way you did in Photoshop. If you want, you can download my custom smart material to have a better look at how it works. The idea is that you can quickly drag the smart material to your model and adjust the color and opacity to achieve the desired result.
You can also use Substance Designer if you prefer a node approach. It’s the same process and it’s really useful for tileable textures. The difference is that you don’t necessarily need a high poly model, to begin with. You can start just by creating your height map and then use nodes to generate other maps and blend them.
Lastly, you can also use rendering in ZBrush to get your maps and use Photoshop to blend them (like here). I used this technique for some of the tileable textures in this project.
After building up a nice base with procedural techniques, it’s time for the hand-painted pass and for whatever objects you decided to fully paint manually. I use 3D-Coat and Photoshop for this part because I like the back and forth workflow and projection painting that 3D-Coat offers. Painting is something that requires a lot of practice and there are not a lot of shortcuts you can take for that. I put together a little breakdown of the way I painted this material study of a wooden cube. Even though this is not a 3D model I think that doing those types of texture studies on cubes can be a great way of improving your skills. All the techniques I’ll be using in this breakdown can be applied to hand-painted textures as well.
My final note on texturing is to try to keep the colors and materials consistent in the environment. For example, if you are using a lot of gold all over the place, make sure it looks like the same gold since a musky dirty gold can really differ from a pristine noble gold. Try to make everything look like it belongs together.
I chose to use Marmoset Toolbag for the lighting and rendering of the diorama because I like the way it renders out non-PBR materials. Initially, I did try to use Unreal Engine for the diorama as I wanted to do some particle effects but I decided to switch because I didn’t like the way the lighting was reacting with the hand-painted textures.
My material setup was really simple but I did use a few tricks to push the stylized look further. I used a modified darker version of the albedo textures to drive the specular color and some of the glossiness. This helped me to tone down very dark shadows and created some vibrant bounced lighting. For transparent materials I used cutout and for gems, I used emissive maps. Also, for the foliage, I reused the albedo map to drive some subsurface Scattering.
I used some plugins that allowed me to use panning and pulse to create a couple of effects with some planes. They are really useful and can help you bring some life into your scene.
I also did a skybox for the scene by layering some clouds in different planes and using a couple of panning clouds.
For the lighting, I used a directional warm light for the key light (sun), a faint cool directional light on the opposite side with cast shadows turned off to fill dark areas, a skylight, fog, and multiple point lights and spotlights around the scene to get the result I wanted. Since the goal of the project was just to create an interesting looking diorama, I wasn’t worried about optimizing the scene or limiting the number of lights I used.
My goal was to define the focal point of the scene and drive the viewer eyes to the bows. To do this, I made the interior of the diorama dark and cool and added most of the light and vibrancy to the pedestals. This created some sort of contrast between the light warm and vibrant bows against the cool, soft and dark interior. I also used light shafts pointing to the pedestals to draw the attention even more. For the exterior, I used some lights to fake more bounce light and colors.
Marmoset’s global illumination is great and it makes most scenes look beautiful. I highly recommend this for anyone who has access to Marmoset Toolbag. These are the settings I used for the rendering and post process.
All of those steps are really important if you want to get the most out of your asset. Presentation is often something a lot of people overlook but it really makes a difference in your portfolio. After all the work you had done modeling, sculpting, and painting you don’t want to ruin everything by a poorly done presentation. With that said, no matter how hard you worked during the whole project, don’t be lazy when it comes to showing it off the best way possible because the images in your portfolio are often the only thing people judge your work from.
I hope that anything in this article could be helpful for you. I learned most of what I know from articles and tutorials, and sharing some knowledge with the community has always been a great wish of mine. This is just the way I approach my projects and it’s definitely not the only way to do it.
If you are interested in hand-painted texturing and want to pursue it as a career you can join the Handpainter’s Guild. This is a Discord group focused on this type of texturing where people help each other and give a lot of great feedback!