SP Fantasy Kingdoms of Arda (Lord of the Rings for Bannerlord)

[Mandible]

His setup really does not make Narf''s way that easy to do. With PBR and Painter, it's kinda hard to fit Zbrush,Xnormal baking and conventional texturing into that workflow.

I don't see any reason why Substance Painter wouldn't work just fine for this workflow. You make the high poly rings in zbrush or Wings3d whatever, you bake the normal map in SP, and boom, there you go. I assume that TheWarArmoury is doing high poly modeling anyway, right?

I'm not saying that it won't take a little experimentation before it looks great, but I think it is worth looking into.

 

[Gothic Knight]

His setup really does not make Narf''s way that easy to do. With PBR and Painter, it's kinda hard to fit Zbrush,Xnormal baking and conventional texturing into that workflow.

I don't see any reason why Substance Painter wouldn't work just fine for this workflow. You make the high poly rings in zbrush or Wings3d whatever, you bake the normal map in SP, and boom, there you go. I assume that TheWarArmoury is doing high poly modeling anyway, right?

I'm not saying that it won't take a little experimentation before it looks great, but I think it is worth looking into.

Have you used Substance painter before? How would you select the rings when doing substance painter? I haven't checked out the issue but I am not sure you can make selections like in conventional photo editing programs. In general materials are used and materials are based on mesh normals.

 

[Mandible]

I do use Substance Painter (won a licence for it in an art contest. Woot!). It has great tools for making selections to apply materials to.

The workflow would look something like this.

Create a low poly ring and duplicate it a bunch of times to make a section of maille. (Possibly in Wings 3D).

Create an image plane of your armor texture and place the 3d rings over it in the places where you would need them (explained in better detail in Narf's original post that I linked above).

Decimate your low poly rings all at the same time to get nicely rounded rings. Adjust for variety (sculpt the overall shape, rotate rings, etc. You could technically still do this in Wings 3D, although Zbrush would definitely be better).

Export the lowpoly armor mesh (which is just the basic geometry of the armor, not individual rings) as well as the high poly rings that you placed.

There are a few ways to get your selection in Painter. You could paint a 2-bit mask to define which areas you want, you could make simply select the applicable faces inside the program, you can select UV islands (very cool feature!) or you can make a color ID map in photoshop or gimp or something (honestly, Microsoft Paint would do just fine for this). The ID map would use colors to define the different areas in the model that will receive different materials (for example, brown for leather, grey for metal, red for cloth. Just flat colors with no variation.

Import low poly into Substance, and bake textures using the highpoly rings.

Then once you have baked the normal maps, occlusion maps, cavity maps, and such based on the high poly, you can use them to drive your smart materials in pretty cool ways. (Applying scratches to more exposed areas, etc.)

It's a little hard to explain, so it would be better to do a video tutorial but I'm not sure I have time (and not that many hobbyists have Substance Painter in the first place).

I have a project in the works that I will hopefully get to in the next few months that will require maille, so I might see what I can do to share the process then as I figure it out myself.

 

[Gothic Knight]

I do use Substance Painter (won a licence for it in an art contest. Woot!). It has great tools for making selections to apply materials to.

The workflow would look something like this.

Create a low poly ring and duplicate it a bunch of times to make a section of maille. (Possibly in Wings 3D).

Create an image plane of your armor texture and place the 3d rings over it in the places where you would need them (explained in better detail in Narf's original post that I linked above).

Decimate your low poly rings all at the same time to get nicely rounded rings. Adjust for variety (sculpt the overall shape, rotate rings, etc. You could technically still do this in Wings 3D, although Zbrush would definitely be better).

Export the lowpoly armor mesh (which is just the basic geometry of the armor, not individual rings) as well as the high poly rings that you placed.

There are a few ways to get your selection in Painter. You could paint a 2-bit mask to define which areas you want, you could make simply select the applicable faces inside the program, you can select UV islands (very cool feature!) or you can make a color ID map in photoshop or gimp or something (honestly, Microsoft Paint would do just fine for this). The ID map would use colors to define the different areas in the model that will receive different materials (for example, brown for leather, grey for metal, red for cloth. Just flat colors with no variation.

Import low poly into Substance, and bake textures using the highpoly rings.

Then once you have baked the normal maps, occlusion maps, cavity maps, and such based on the high poly, you can use them to drive your smart materials in pretty cool ways. (Applying scratches to more exposed areas, etc.)

It's a little hard to explain, so it would be better to do a video tutorial but I'm not sure I have time (and not that many hobbyists have Substance Painter in the first place).

I have a project in the works that I will hopefully get to in the next few months that will require maille, so I might see what I can do to share the process then as I figure it out myself.

Thanks. I understand most of it and it sounds good. Maybe you can show how to make an id map or 2d mask because using a black mask over the chain parts and revealing the chains would be a hassle.

 

[Mandible]

That is super simple and I can just do it with a couple of images. Hang tight for the post edit...

[EDIT]

Here is the simple process.

1. In Wings3D, after unwrapping the UVs, apply vertex color to the areas that are made out of different materials. (Don't worry about faces that have more than one material on them for now).
2. Now, create a texture and choose to draw faces instead of drawing edges.
3. Now export the texture map with the vertex colors applied and open it up in your image editing software (photoshop?)
4. I always expand the UV islands a little bit so that there aren't any white sections on the model. (select UV sections, expand by 5 pixels, fill with paint tool).
5. Now paint in the details that you didn't catch with the vertex paint. Make sure you keep separate colors for each different material type with no color variation (ie. All parts that you want to be made out of the same type of wood have to be exactly the same shade of brown. Actually you can use any color you want, but I like to pick colors that read easily so I can remember what they are.
6. Now you can open up your file in Substance Painter. Bake maps from high poly (not covered here) and when you want to add a new material, just right click on it and select Add mask with color selection.
7. Now you can import the ID map that we made and when we click Pick color, we can click directly on the model to choose the ID color to apply the material to. So then everything that was the same color of yellow will now have the metallic material applied.
8. Do the same for each material type.
9. Then do a bunch of other stuff that I'm not going to cover here until you have the effect that you want =)


As for Chainmail, that could be a little bit more complicated. I would have to experiment a bit, but my guess is that you could get a decent ID map by baking a cavity map, selecting the inverse of the background color and deleting it in photoshop. I know for a fact that there are better ways of generating opacity maps so someone who has a better idea could chime in here. Depending on software, you can generate an opacity map in your modeling program but not in Wings3D. 3DS Max would be able to do that, for sure.

 

[Gothic Knight]

That is super simple and I can just do it with a couple of images. Hang tight for the post edit...

[EDIT]

Here is the simple process.

1. In Wings3D, after unwrapping the UVs, apply vertex color to the areas that are made out of different materials. (Don't worry about faces that have more than one material on them for now).
2. Now, create a texture and choose to draw faces instead of drawing edges.
3. Now export the texture map with the vertex colors applied and open it up in your image editing software (photoshop?)
4. I always expand the UV islands a little bit so that there aren't any white sections on the model. (select UV sections, expand by 5 pixels, fill with paint tool).
5. Now paint in the details that you didn't catch with the vertex paint. Make sure you keep separate colors for each different material type with no color variation (ie. All parts that you want to be made out of the same type of wood have to be exactly the same shade of brown. Actually you can use any color you want, but I like to pick colors that read easily so I can remember what they are.
6. Now you can open up your file in Substance Painter. Bake maps from high poly (not covered here) and when you want to add a new material, just right click on it and select Add mask with color selection.
7. Now you can import the ID map that we made and when we click Pick color, we can click directly on the model to choose the ID color to apply the material to. So then everything that was the same color of yellow will now have the metallic material applied.
8. Do the same for each material type.
9. Then do a bunch of other stuff that I'm not going to cover here until you have the effect that you want =)


As for Chainmail, that could be a little bit more complicated. I would have to experiment a bit, but my guess is that you could get a decent ID map by baking a cavity map, selecting the inverse of the background color and deleting it in photoshop. I know for a fact that there are better ways of generating opacity maps so someone who has a better idea could chime in here. Depending on software, you can generate an opacity map in your modeling program but not in Wings3D. 3DS Max would be able to do that, for sure.

Thanks. Actually I don't think painting the chainmail will be too difficult. I assume you can just use selections to color the id for the chainmail after baking it in xnormal or whatever.

 

[Feed Me]

Hei, Models looks awesome! We're waiting for it

 

[John_M]

Spoiler

I will work on it eventually as well. I got like 8 chain pattern arrays made atm.

Good work with the texturing btw.

Nice, that riveted mail looks good!

6. Now you can open up your file in Substance Painter. Bake maps from high poly (not covered here) and when you want to add a new material, just right click on it and select Add mask with color selection.
7. Now you can import the ID map that we made and when we click Pick color, we can click directly on the model to choose the ID color to apply the material to. So then everything that was the same color of yellow will now have the metallic material applied.

As for Chainmail, that could be a little bit more complicated. I would have to experiment a bit, but my guess is that you could get a decent ID map by baking a cavity map, selecting the inverse of the background color and deleting it in photoshop. I know for a fact that there are better ways of generating opacity maps so someone who has a better idea could chime in here. Depending on software, you can generate an opacity map in your modeling program but not in Wings3D. 3DS Max would be able to do that, for sure.

This is what I'm planning to do, should be easy enough to add the mask, making the empty parts invisible, or perhaps cloth or whatever is under the chainmail.

Spoiler

Here I made the high poly, nothing too special. It could use some randomization and folds.

Spoiler

Some basic textures, looks pretty bad with no opacity. You can see I started painting it in the center rightish, which looks much better. When I have time to experiment with masking I'll update.

Hei, Models looks awesome! We're waiting for it

Great

 

[Gothic Knight]

Yours looks pretty good too. Suffice to say I won't be using it anytime soon as I have other stuff to texture.

 

[Mandible]

This is what I'm planning to do, should be easy enough to add the mask, making the empty parts invisible, or perhaps cloth or whatever is under the chainmail.

Spoiler

Here I made the high poly, nothing too special. It could use some randomization and folds

The rings do look good. Definitely try to rotate them and move them around a bit so they aren't so uniform. =)

 

[Linir]

Ah great! Something to look forward to!

 

[kraggrim]

Soming that might be relevant to you guys.

 

[John_M]

Soming that might be relevant to you guys.

Thanks, I'll see if the team or I have anything we would like to ask

 

[John_M]

Spoiler

Still work in progress, not to mention only the helmet. But there hasn't been anything posted in awhile so I thought I would share it

 

[Antonis]

Very nice! I really like the dwarven aesthetic designs of the LotR movieverse. Your interpretations, as always, is amazing.

 

[John_M]

Thanks I feel the same way, the Erebor Dwarves are some of my favourite things that came from the Hobbit trilogy.

 

[Pumpkin Lord]

I loved that helmet, man. Sick job.

 

[Gothic Knight]

Spoiler

Still work in progress, not to mention only the helmet. But there hasn't been anything posted in awhile so I thought I would share it

Only thing I can complain about are that the eye slits are huge. I mean the point of a full face helmet is to protect the face, not provide an opening for it.

 

[John_M]

Only thing I can complain about are that the eye slits are huge. I mean the point of a full face helmet is to protect the face, not provide an opening for it.

Well, they aren't exactly eye slits, more of eye holes.

Spoiler

Still bigger than most helmets, not by a lot mostly wider. I could try to close the gap a bit, but not too much as then it won't look like the original.

Spoiler

Also, here is some concept by our artist Simon, lower tier Pelargir soldier

 

[Gothic Knight]

That looks pretty awesome.

Well, they aren't exactly eye slits, more of eye holes.

Good point. My criticism isn't that valid eh?