Frio's 3D texturing stuff

[frio]

I do some texture work for a 3D environment procedurally in Blender, but I also tinker with what I can come up with manually. I'm not much a "painter" type artist so I just use basic tools and filters, and luckily that's just what Paint.net has in spades, and felt like sharing some things I've come up with.

 

Lately I've been experimenting with glTF PBR materials: certain properties of the surface are packaged into varying channels in a set of textures, which are then rendered according to those properties within the scene. These images have the base color, normal map and ambient occlusion, roughness and metallicity:

 

They combine to look like this in the actual 3D environment:

For something slightly more organic but not necessarily super realistic, a literal golden eye, as in the eye color is luminous metallic gold. The fourth image contains the emissivity of the material, i.e. it actually radiates a bit of golden light:

Within the scene, it does look kinda groovy and shiny:

Some older material, using diffuse-specular rendering. I made this cassette tape model in Blender as close to the real dimensions as I could, with a fairly low polygon count to make it usable for realtime rendering, extracted the ambient occlusion and then painted on details like the label and screws:

As a side note, the cassette is actually functional inworld and can hold about as much data as a C-20 cassette would have on a Commodore 64, used with a 6502 CPU emulator.

 

I also make some particle effects (that is, just small textured squares that always face the camera, like sprites in classic Doom). This set is for something that simulates classic JRPG style status effects, think of oldschool Final Fantasy:

The skull wasn't all self-drawn, but a public domain poison symbol I rearranged and removed the jaw from.

 

The control panel for the above effect is also made in Paint.net:

[Red ochre]

Very impressive results and knowledge of Blender, height maps etc.
The C20 is very convincing, I believe I still have one in the dedicated cassette player for my C64.🙂

 

[Pixey]

Great work 🥳 and I love the glossiness

[Tactilis]

2 hours ago, frio said:

I do some texture work for a 3D environment procedurally in Blender, but I also tinker with what I can come up with manually. I'm not much a "painter" type artist so I just use basic tools and filters, and luckily that's just what Paint.net has in spades, and felt like sharing some things I've come up with.

Awesome work @frio.

 

The tools and filters used maybe basic but the way you apply them and combine paint.net with other apps is superb.

[lynxster4]

Very impressive work @frio!  I'm particularly drawn to the eye...beautiful highlighting.  ☺️

[frio]

Sauron sees what you did there.

 

4-layered particle effect, the eye base (iris/pupil area) sadly isn't animated since the particle engine is a bit limited and janky, but the ring of flames dances and shimmers pretty convincingly if I say so myself. Click for full size on Imgur.

 

[lynxster4]

It's mesmerizing and creepy from Lord of the Rings. 

[frio]

42 minutes ago, lynxster4 said:

It's mesmerizing and creepy from Lord of the Rings. 

Since particle effects in this 3D engine (almost) always face the camera, it's always staring at you, judging. 

[Pixey]

Very fiery indeed. I love the reflection texture very much 🤗

[Tactilis]

3 hours ago, lynxster4 said:

It's mesmerizing and creepy...

 

Now combine it with your latest stained glass technique @lynxster4 to make it "mesmerizing and creepy, but rather lovely"  😉

 

 

Amazing work @frio

[lynxster4]

19 hours ago, Tactilis said:

Now combine it with your latest stained glass technique

 

I don't know if it's 'rather lovely' but here it is.  I had no shape to work with so I added random lines, but I did 'stain-glassify' it.  This is for you @frio  ☺️

I did this rather quickly, so it's probably not the greatest.

 

[frio]

1 hour ago, lynxster4 said:

I don't know if it's 'rather lovely' but here it is.

Perfect for decorating the dining hall of Angband, love it. (For the non-LotR nerds, that's a fortress Sauron used to command before the books' time.)

Edited September 17 by frio

[Tactilis]

16 minutes ago, frio said:

Perfect for decorating the dining hall of Angband

Yes!

In his younger days, Sauron liked a bit of stained glass in the fortress.

He was also big into decorative curtains and placed scatter cushions randomly to enhance the casual ambience.

A nice guy.

Not sure what happened to him.

😉
 

[frio]

Today's project: Metroid Prime logo and/or Varia suit powerup. Click for a full 4K resolution image on imgur.

 

The model is from Sketchfab, though I did end up redoing and smoothing out most of the geometry and textures were made from scratch, baked with Blender and composited/adjusted with paint.net.

 

Also recorded a short animation loop to appreciate the shiny metals: https://i.imgur.com/a3H0y1w.mp4 (animations won't embed, click to view)

[frio]

For today, some spicy cobalt, the infamous radiation source rod.

 

Drew the details and the text in paint.net trying to match the original font as closely as I could (turns out Liberation Sans was very close, needed to manually edit only a couple letters), used those as the normal map/color source in Blender, then added some brushed metal texturing and blemishes into appropriate channels. Simple but satisfying, I just enjoy how simple two-tone textures can turn into realistic metals. 

[lynxster4]

Nicely done @frio  Looks like a photograph. That's what I call realistic! 😊

[frio]

57 minutes ago, lynxster4 said:

Looks like a photograph. That's what I call realistic! 😊

Part of why I've been enjoying this tinkering lately is that it's actually presented a realtime game engine, so fancy raytracing and such isn't required anymore to get some pretty decent realistic light behavior. If you look close enough you can still see it's all just smoke and mirrors as opposed to the real raytracing, but... the end result being convincing but still running at 60 frames per second is what matters.

[Pixey]

Wow!  That is SO authentic - it looks like the real deal 👏