Digital Art Zone

I’ve been after something like this for ages! So glad that you’re working on this, Marieah. 

cwichura - 21 December 2012 09:05 PM

I’ve always wanted to use the top of the tower from Dragon Island for some ideas with figures coming out of the door onto the battlements, but every time I’ve tried, the low-rez stone texture is just soooo aweful when viewed up close, I give up.  Hopefully with this, that tower will become usable for closeups.

Do you mean this one? I was in need of a fresh prop to practice on. One shows the original textures, and the other is “Renovated”. I leave you to guess which is which.

Thanks Shaaelia!  It’s really amazing how often the obvious gets overlooked, with so much content out there and vendors struggling for product ideas.

Marieah - 21 December 2012 11:37 PM

cwichura - 21 December 2012 09:05 PM

I’ve always wanted to use the top of the tower from Dragon Island

Do you mean this one? I was in need of a fresh prop to practice on. One shows the original textures, and the other is “Renovated”. I leave you to guess which is which.

Yes, that one.  Yours looks great.    Your render is actually still fairly far away compared to having the camera right up there on the battlements.  That would really put the included textures to shame.  They’re fine for the far away shots like are seen in the promos for Dragon Island, but unusable close up…

This shader set will absolutely be a must-buy when released.  I use several of your other shader sets quite a lot, too (primarily Silk Essence and Lace Maker); I’ve worked out how to best optimize them for use in LuxRender (which I do all my renders with—I don’t use 3Delight) over time, and I expect this new set will be fairly straight forward to adapt as well.

Kyoto Kid - 21 December 2012 12:54 PM

...oh my, what I could do to Stonemason’s “Big City” with this.

~GASP~  That would be the perfect environment to try these out on.  Glad you thought of it. 

Any textures for creating Pueblo style housing and/or Spanish missions?

cwichura I’m glad you like it, These textures look even better close up because you get all the detail that the high resolution delivers.

ZamuelNow, I think you will find some textures suitable for what you need,

Here’s a render of The Barn with its original and Renovate textures side by side. The original textures were nice, but very bland. The new ones add interest and drama to The Barn I think. You can also see some Shader Mixer grass I’m including. There’s Astro turf as well.

The other render shows some of a heap of marble textures I’ve just added. We all own a big pile of monumental architecture, much of it puchased for $1.99 so providing an appropriate way of livening it up seemed well worth doing.

Kyoto Kid - 21 December 2012 12:54 PM

...oh my, what I could do to Stonemason’s “Big City” with this.

You may need to check the mapping… I don’t know how much he already tiles in that set, which might limit flexibility a bit.

zigraphix - 22 December 2012 09:49 PM

Kyoto Kid - 21 December 2012 12:54 PM

...oh my, what I could do to Stonemason’s “Big City” with this.

You may need to check the mapping… I don’t know how much he already tiles in that set, which might limit flexibility a bit.

If sets are mapped instead of tiled, you can sometimes lose some of the map-painted detail, such as in my first courtyard renders. But this doesn’t necessarily matter. What does matter is if the original maker has added lots of unrelated zones to a main zone called, for example, “Roof”.  When you apply the shaders you’ll end up with roof tiles, not just on the roof, but in all sorts of other places as well. This can be fixed by reassigning the mat zones fairly easily in DS.

Other sets, such as Storm Castle, are all tiled, so that works really well.

I haven’t tried a Stonemason set yet. I guess I should.

Meanwhile, here’s some fun with the Witch House. The original has the grey shingle roof. The original textures are excellent so this is more a restyling than a bid for better resolution.

Love it!

What I meant about tiled textures was that sometimes the items are uvmapped to use a single tile image, not using tiled textures in the Surfaces pane. This can interfere with substituting different tiles.

zigraphix - 23 December 2012 08:57 AM

Love it!

What I meant about tiled textures was that sometimes the items are uvmapped to use a single tile image, not using tiled textures in the Surfaces pane. This can interfere with substituting different tiles.

I see what you mean. Sets like that would be an issue alright. I haven’t come across any yet in my journey through my props library and I hope I don’t.

I’m also including a few different bar and grill sets…(no, not the places where you drink alcohol and eat lol) but textures that will let you make windows into cell windows and buildings into cages if you feel like it. Here’s an example where I made the top of the Fantasy Castle into a scary cage for a hapless M5. Not the copper roofing tiles also…

...that’s really cool. Will there also be an oxidised and weathered copper?

Marieah - 23 December 2012 02:42 PM

zigraphix - 23 December 2012 08:57 AM

Love it!

What I meant about tiled textures was that sometimes the items are uvmapped to use a single tile image, not using tiled textures in the Surfaces pane. This can interfere with substituting different tiles.

I see what you mean. Sets like that would be an issue alright. I haven’t come across any yet in my journey through my props library and I hope I don’t.

I’m also including a few different bar and grill sets…(no, not the places where you drink alcohol and eat lol) but textures that will let you make windows into cell windows and buildings into cages if you feel like it. Here’s an example where I made the top of the Fantasy Castle into a scary cage for a hapless M5. Not the copper roofing tiles also…

 

There isn’t at the moment, but I agree that there needs to be as the emphasis in this set is on the worn and the grungy.  This is because it’s what I’ve noticed people asking for most over the years. Such surfaces can be really difficult to tile because their hallmark is their irregularity. There will be some textures here that will work better over smaller areas. I think that’s a better option than deleting them.

Now I’d better find a filter or a brush somewhere to grunge up that lovely copper…

Instead of grunging the textures directly, what about a few grunge overlays that can be applied to any material? So you have the option of clean or dirty in different areas? That way it won’t look so tiled as well and will add more variety. Just a thought.

I wonder if adding in a few LIE patches would be a way to allow irregularities by allowing users to add them themselves.  For some textures this won’t work but it may be good for others.

ZamuelNow - 23 December 2012 06:20 PM

I wonder if adding in a few LIE patches would be a way to allow irregularities by allowing users to add them themselves.  For some textures this won’t work but it may be good for others.

That is what I was hinting at:)