Art tutorials : Screencast, WIP, and Fanart.

[Tims]

Hello everybody !
I'm Tim Soret, a freelance designer, the one who did Lugaru HD currently featured on the blog.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/05/lugaru-hd/

I really love indie developpers
I helped to beta-test the Penumbra games, I made the HD assets of Chopper the famous mac & iPhone game, I'm the 2D artist of the most ambitious Crysis Mod, Cassius Belli, and soon, I plan to mod Overgrowth in the future when it will be available.

Why Overgrowth ?
Because Lugaru's universe is interesting artistically and the modding tools they're preparing seem to be really intuitive just as Little Big Planet or the Crysis SDK.

The Wolfire team relies on us
to make great mods, great campaigns, and great assets. That's why I open this thread : I'll try to share everything I know about texturing, creating 2D art, matte painting, etc...



——————————— THE FIRST TUTORIAL WILL BE ———————————————

1 • Skinning the Whaleman using Photoshop CS4
We will create the diffuse texture, the bump map, and the specular map, to achieve this organic look only using Photoshop CS4. We will cover how to import the model back to Overgrowth in a other tutorial !
Video Preview : http://www.timsoret.com/out/og/whaleman.mov



Coming soon !

[Tonjevic]

Looking forward to it!

It'll be really nice to hear from someone whose work is professional qualityt!

[Jeff]

Man that is an awesome icon, and awesome whaleman! It's great to have you in SPF.

[John]

You're the man Tim. The OG Icon and Whale Man look great. I can't wait to see what's next. Also, thanks for alerting us to the AZERTY keyboard issue. With your help we should be able to figure that out pretty soon.

[Odin]

Good idea and nice works!

[Skofo]

Whoa, neato!

And I didn't know Photoshop could do 3D...

[Richie Rabbit]

That looks cool but i think the whale needs an iris.

[Nimai]

Awesome man!
nice work!!

[shadow717]

Whoa, neato!

And I didn't know Photoshop could do 3D...

There's several ways to do it. You could kind of emulate 3D, or you can get plug ins. (I'm using CS3)

[Endoperez]

And I didn't know Photoshop could do 3D...

I guess I'll post a short explanation, since everyone might not know this...

When a 3d model is "colored", these colors are stored in a 2d image file. These images can be made in Photoshop, and this is what Tim Soret's tutorial will explain.

"diffuse texture, the bump map, and the specular map, to achieve this organic look only using Photoshop CS4"

diffuse texture: color. The big colored areas like back and stomach, small variations (freckles or something on a human), eyes, etc.
bump map: little bumps and wrinkles and such; everything that's not already in the model. If you look at your palm, you see lots of wrinkles. Doing a 3d hand that has all those wrinkles as shapes is slow. Doing a hand and basically "painting" those wrinkles is much faster, and takes less resources.
specular map: how different parts reflect light. I'm not sure how it would best be used on a character that doesn't have equipment, but e.g. metal weapons and buckles reflect more light than cloth and skin.

[Tims]

It's exactly that, except that the specular map is essential to simulate the irregular and grainy reflections of skin, sweat, etc... I'll detail everything in the video tutorial, I hope you'll be able to understand my poor English as I'm french

[tomascokis]

I'm sure your english will be fine - cool looking tutorial, can't wait till its out

[OpethRockr55]

Oh, man! I had absolutely no clue you could paint directly onto a model in CS4!

I was going to finish up my organic version of Whale Man after I first released him, but I thought Aubrey would probably do that for the actual game. If I made mine a statue, there could still be some ambiguity as to what the real Whale Man looks like.

He looks great, though, and I'm totally looking forward to this tutorial.

[Hale]

Awesome stuff tim, I am greatly looking forward to some of your stuff... ^_^

[Jeff]

Could I have the PSD of that OG icon? It looks amazing.