Painting Tutorial - 2D/3D Integration

In this tutorial I go over how I integrate 3D elements into a 2D concept/illustration.

This process involves taking a sketch of the object and using it to model the design in a 3D application. A simple greyscale render is then used in Gimp/Photoshop above set to multiply which creates the lighting and form.

Points of interest:

* Can speed up the painting process, especially for simple designs easily created in 3D.
* Results in crisp paintings.
* Frees up the mind to concentrate on design.
* Is a good guide.
* Creates very good perspective.

Painting - Rural Road

This is the first painting I've done for a while that isn't a study or something project related. To be fair it's "kind of" a study (indirect reference, painted only using a hard round brush and a leaf brush you can see on the left), but it's refined and presentable enough. Click for 1080p.

Blender GPU vs CPU rendering speeds

This is just a quick comparison to show the difference between rendering with the CPU and with the graphics card (GPU).

40.03 seconds compared to 2.98 is a fairly large difference and it becomes very apparent when waiting for a render.

Words don't do the numbers justice:

 I hope Blender Cycles gets OpenCL (non-proprietary and available to both Nvidia and AMD video cards) support soon, the difference is pretty large. This also helps show what an improvement the GPU is over the CPU for certain tasks in general. This has yet to be fully utilized in games, hopefully once OpenCL gets going we'll see games take full advantage of it.

Gimp 2.7.4 Experiments, MyPaint and a Submarine

I recorded a speed painting to show it in action, you can see it on Youtube below:

Here's the new interface, though the default is different of course, this is how I have it set up. There are a number of improvements on 2.6.11 that I was able to spot, as well as a few issues of course:

• Single window mode is great
• Absolute and relative control over slider bars for better control
• It's now easier to see where to click & drag to resize windows
• Layers are shorter and more compact and efficient
• So many Paint Dynamics! For me this is the best feature
• A much improved make seamless filter which doesn't give "blurred" results
• Improved selection graphics, the lasso tool is especially nice
• Brush outlines no longer take up huge amounts of processing time, a real issue before

• Paint Dynamics are quite difficult to get to and slow the painting process down
• Quick access to most used dynamics - size & opacity > on/off and simple curves would be nice
• Not sure why some sliders do not look the same (navigator zoom and the opacity sliders)
• "Export" instead of "save as a copy" for .jpg etc takes getting used to at first
• Bugs, though they are to be expected in an unstable release

Overall, while some aspects feel slow and clumsy, it is very nice to use and seems much more professional than previous versions. Click for larger version:

I also dabbled in MyPaint which was interesting, though I sorely missed having the powerful features of Gimp such as masks, selections, filters etc. MyPaint is a program which simply "feels" fantastic to work in, everything is so smooth, it reminds me of swimming for some reason. I'd really like to be able to quickly transfer my work from Gimp to MyPaint and back since they both have fantastic features. I did a quick paint-over of a simple in Gimp, sketch done in MyPaint. Result below:

Ah, the fluid post is on the way, I hope, it turned out it was more work than I anticipated. I'm rendering the last of the flooded sub corridor though, more on the way :)

Gimp 2.7.4

I only just discovered that you can try out Gimp 2.7.4, the latest version of Gimp and a step closer to the fabled Gimp 2.8 I've been waiting for. I was off to a bit of a rough start, but ended up over at Partha's Place (http://www.partha.com/) where he has provided binaries, many thanks!

After an hour or so playing around like a child with the new toy he's been waiting on since the last Christmas I've got mixed feelings. I really like some of the changes and new features yet at the same time the whole thing feels much more clumsy and harder to use.

Take the "Paint Dynamics" for example: to change the curve of the pressure-dependent size dynamic you must locate the Tool Options window, click on the Dynamics icon which will then bring up a quick menu containing the Dynamics presets, click on another Dynamics icon, this time small and right down the bottom, then the "Paint Dynamics" window will appear, you can then either double click on an entry to edit it (keeping in mind it will edit that entry for all brushes which use it) or click on the "Create new dynamics" button which will bring up the old "Brush Dynamics" menu that used to rest in the Tool Options window, you must then click on Size-Pressure to enable pressure dependent size and then near the top you must click on the drop down menu with "Mapping matrix" written on it and select size. Sorry that sentence was getting far too long, ran out of breath. Next you must manipulate the curve to produce the results you want, also keeping in mind that it doesn't tell you anything, which axis is pressure and which is size? Up, down, left, right? Sorry, that's as confusing and time consuming as the process I just described, a picture might convey things better:

That's simple enough, right? But what are we comparing it to? What I just described is basically the same thing as the "Power" slider in Gimp Painter - oops, I just gave away the end of this story didn't I.

Let's take a look at that same process in Gimp Painter:

I don't want to end on that note of course, I'm very grateful to everyone who contributes to Gimp, I love the program, but the new interface needs a lot of streamlining.

Tutorial - Texturing

I just finished a painting and was really happy with how the texture came out so I thought I'd share how I did it.

Click for larger images.

I should have some more stuff coming, I hope you got something out of this, see you next time :)

Making Believable Grass

   Grass is one of the most important things in a game environment and adds immensely to the believability of the scene. Compare the following, the same scene with no grass or bushes and then with:

   Without grass it's easy to pick up the tell-tale signs that you're playing a game: you can see the sharp edges of the ground mesh, see the perfectly sharp edges where objects intersect the ground and each other, see the flat ground textures etc.

   I'll just go over some of the things I've learned while painting and creating grass in 3D.

Think of the grass and ground as a single object.

   You don't need to do this if you can make all of the grass with geometry, but that's a lot of geometry. So if you can't do that it means you're going to have to use a ground texture that looks like grass, the problem with this is that a simple flat texture looks flat, so to add depth you add grass geometry.

   When making the grass it's important to see it and the ground as a single object, not two separate ones. In relation to the ground texture the grass is simply breaking up the “flatness” of it and tricking you into believing that you're seeing real grass instead of a computer's representation of it. Therefore your grass and ground texture should compliment each other.

   This brings me to the second point:

The grass texture should be different but extremely similar to the ground texture.

   This may at first sound confusing, so let me explain what I mean. You don't want the grass to be so different it looks like you stuck a few textured planes on the ground (which is pretty much what's happening), yet you also don't want them to be so similar that the grass melts into the ground as if invisible, that would defeat the whole purpose.

   You need to make the grass look as though it belongs, it should match (although not perfectly) the saturation and value of the ground beneath it while being visible. The best way to do this is to have the base of the grass join the ground as seamlessly as possible yet have the top different enough to be visible. This will give the best results.

Final touches

   Toward the end you can add some extra details that will make the grass look a lot more interesting and realistic as well.

• Ambient Occlusion – this is a tricky one, you want enough for the effect to be visible but not so much the grass sticks out. Carefully darken the base of the grass and test to see the results. You'll be able to get away with a bit here but go too far and the grass will start to separate from the ground.
• Lighten ends – lightening the ends of the grass strands can really help make it pop out from the background, you want the grass to be grounded and blend into the ground texture but you certainly don't want the top to be lost. This will help add depth.
• Colour variation – real grass is not made of a single colour, there are dead strands, strands that have subsurface light scattering going on, disease spots, reflections and all other manner of things that influence the colour. Putting in some of these colours makes it much more believable. Good colours to use are yellows, oranges, browns and greys.

   Below you can see the grass I used for the previous scene as well as the ground texture it was designed to sit on:

   I hope you got something out of this, good luck :)