After my previous hand painted Acorn Shop piece I really wanted to try out the same technique but this time lit with PBR, as the Acorn Shop was unlit with the lighting painted into the albedo texture.

I'm treating this piece as another practice to try combining the hand painted style with materials like metal and glass to see what result I could get and this concept by Elodie seemed like a great option for some sculpted detail as well as the metal and glass details of the jar, hooks, mug and tin! 

I started off with a basic shape blockout in perspective view using PureRef to overlay the concept onto 3dsMax for more accurate proportions, scale and layout. 

I then went through and modelled each asset separately, replacing the blockout as I went.
I aimed to keep this on the lower poly side, similarly to my Acorn Shop, but made sure to add a few mesh details, such as the cut offs of the corners of the wooden crate and wraps around the mug to add more dimension detail for the piece to be viewed from more than a set single angle.
However since I was planning to create a high poly sculpt for this piece, unlike with my Acorn Shop, there were a few details, like the rope and mug cracks, that I left to be added during sculpting, as I usually would.





The unwrapping of this piece was nothing special. Usually for hand painted pieces I would avoid overlapping UVs for duplicated parts, such as the tentacle suckers and barnacles, however for this piece I chose to overlap these parts in a few sections, grouping lower and higher barnacles separately as I knew I wanted darken those nearer the bottom and this would account for that without having to UV each barnacle separately.

Once unwrapped I duplicated my models, removed any duplicates and pulled apart the pieces, as shown below, to give me a clear view of everything for my low polys to export to Substance Painter for texturing later on. 

I then duplicated the low polys, adding a Turbosmooth modifier to give me my high poly bases that are ready to be taken into Zbrush for sculpting! 

During sculpting I made use of the well known Orb Brush pack as I find it's great for creating the sharp edges and flat surfaces that I'll need to definite areas, particularly the wood of the create and mug, as well as smoothing out areas of the candle and plant bag.

One technique I had to look into while sculpting was creating high poly rope, as I hadn't tried this before but needed a quicker and easier workflow for the rope on the crate shown above and the rope around the glass jar.
For this I found that converting 2 side-by-side twisted cylinders into an Insert Mesh Brush allowed me to paint the same shaped rope along side my high poly base and simply replace them. This gave me really simple and clean rope detail!

The rest of the sculpting was pretty basic as my main goal was just to add missing details, like the cracks of the mug, and to sharpen up edges. I still wanted most of the detail to come from the textures. 

After decimating and exporting my new high polys I took these into Substance Painter and baking, going back and forth fixing any errors or artefacts caused by the baking settings, low poly and UVs and thankfully there we very few! 

I organised my files by creating layers for each object/material and adding a base colour to these.

From here I began my usual stylized texturing workflow of using position gradients and curvature generators over masks to add in some basic edge highlights and ambient occlusion. This helped as a starting point but I chose to later on refine all these areas by hand to recreate the more illustrative and hand painted style of the concept.

I also began adding in some painted details like the pufferfish's eyes, the map and can images and the moss. 

This is where I started using more of the painting workflow I'd used in my Acorn Shop piece to add in surface texture and brush strokes, mainly to the create at this point, along with the bigger shapes of the mug and beginning on the roughness map to add shine to the tentacle and metal. 

Next I went back and made some edits to the mesh as I felt the sandwich was a little small considering it's the focal point and I wanted the tentacle to curve a little more toward the right end. I Also repositioned the lettuce as the tentacle was clipping through inside the sandwich! 

This is where I started to add finer details and decided to take the piece into Marmoset to decide how I wanted to light and render it to better inform the edits I was making at this point, especially concerning the roughness and metallic maps as I ended up having to play around with these to get the result I wanted in Marmoset, which I'm not used to using.

I cut out the alpha of the umbrella, refined the glass of the jar and also reworked the bread and bag textures as I wasn't happy with the curvature map was giving me so removed it and hand painted these areas instead to better match the chunkier blocks of colour of concept.

Finally I did some more work on the PBR, mainly as I was struggling to get a good result for the shininess of the glass jar with hand painting alone as I wanted to avoid painting in the light and reflections, so ended up pushing the glossiness of the material instead which portrayed it as glass a lot better.

I also added in the candle flame, something I forgot to model earlier but managed to add to the existing UVs.
I made some final adjustments to the mesh, just tweaking the positionings and proportions now that I had my final render shot locked in on Marmoset and continued to refine the textures until I was happy with the result! 

Although this piece still slightly favours the angle and lighting of the original concept due to the few hand painted highlights and shadow I'm pleased with the result and I achieved my goal of combining my previous hand painted style with PBR, so I'm happy!

I think this concept would defintely would suit the Sea of Thieves style more so, especially if used in game, but I'm glad I got to use it to continue my objective to explore and improve my hand painting skills! 

Having not attempted any hand painted 3D work since my first year of university 3 years ago I really wanted to revisit the topic and improve my texturing skills, especially since hand painted is one of my favourite art styles!

I'd had this concept saved for so long and thought it was the perfect small prop to get started on, especially with its rougher illustrative feel. 

I started off with a blockout in perspective view, overlaying the concept image in PureRef to make sure my layout and proportions were correct, especially as the final result would only really be viewed from the same angle shown in the concept.

While modelling I payed little attention to normals and gave everything a single smoothing group since neither would have any effect on the final result as an unlit piece, and instead focused on the silhouette and the shapes of bigger cracks and creases that would help enhance the texturing later on. I also kept the model quite low poly to keep the detail in the textures.

Unwrapping this piece was a breeze as seams wouldn't be visible in the final view and since I wasn't aiming for an overly game ready asset, more so a texture practice, I separated my UV sets prioritising texturing ease, rather than optimization, having a set each for the floor, canopy, wooden cart and then décor. 
This would allow me to easily hide each set during texturing which meant I didn't have to separate the assets at all to be able to view and paint hidden areas like underneath the acorn box. This approach also allowed me to view the final result with ease as I progressed. 

Since I planned for this piece to be unlit I couldn't use duplicated assets like I usually would for things like the acorns, birds and jars, since the lighting would be uniquely painted into the albedo map of each object and would require them to have no overlapping UVs.

Moving on to texturing in Substance Painter, I masked off each group of assets, organised my layers and blocking in my base colours.
I made use of this unlit-with-alpha-blending shader to allow me to work completely until, along with opacity which I use on the floor plane and areas of the leaves and moss.
Using Substance Painter's 'Base Colour' view mode works fine as well if you're not working with opacity.

Working in Painter was particularly helpful for this piece as I could angle my camera to match the concept and simply paint from there as if it were 2D, rather than hand painting flat textures in Photoshop with no view of the model.
I could also make slight adjustments to the model after plotting out the texture details and reimport the mesh with no fuss which was really helpful.

I started off with the biggest shapes using rough brush strokes and once I'd filled out all I could see from the main front camera angle I worked around the rest of the piece to fill in the empty spaces behind that aren't visible in the concept.
Going over the whole prop from large to small shapes defintely helped a lot with those hidden areas on the concept as I picked up patterns and shapes from the front and applied them to the back in the same way, which kept the texturing cohesive all around. 



Referring to and from the concept I slowly started filling in smaller shapes and finer details like the sign text and jar labels, though keeping in mind not to overwork it or get too lost in the details to still obtain the illustrative feel.

I got asked a lot how I achieved the painterly feel and visible brush strokes and what exact brush I used, but I never actually switched from the default round brush! I found it helped when getting to the mid-small shapes and colour detail to work at half opacity and simply keep overlapping rather than blending to avoid areas looking too airbrushed and smooth. 



As I got more comfortable with the process and patterns of the texturing I stopped referring to the concept and refined things specific to my own model, since it was never going to be an exact match and the concept provided no back or side views.

I made a couple tweaks to the model to make sure that each angle was as interesting as possible despite the front being the focus and I imported everything in Marmoset to render, which was simple given the lack of lighting and PBR!

I ended up really happy with how this piece turned out considering my lack of experience with hand painted textures but I defintely picked up some tricks to help speed things up along the way, though having a more painterly style concept to reference really helped as practice piece!

I really enjoyed the process of manually creating the illusion of depth and detail that would usually come from normal maps and lighting and found the whole activity pretty soothing, similar to painting miniatures or clay models!
Although this piece/style would only work in single angle games such as top down or card games, which I'm not usually fond of playing myself, hand painted textures defintely remain one of my favourite art styles and I'm looking forward to creating some more hand painted scenes!