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!