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Contrast, Drama, Gradients: Setting up a base thought process for texturing

Updated: Jul 18, 2021

Greetings once again! Today I'll try and convey my thoughts on taking decisions when texturing. I always strive to learn more techniques, nodes and make my own materials, masks, and alpha libraries. Although, while texturing, I used to just mess around with what "felt" right, or I thought looked good and trust me, when you texture you easily get in what they call "tunnel vision" and lose track on what's going on. People who have a better eye for detail will generally have better results, but if you establish a thought process you will at least save lots of time adjusting and re-adjusting or try tweaking stuff to what looks best, as well as taking deliberate decisions and adding "character" to your art. Huge disclaimer: As of the moment I'm writing this blog post, I haven't worked in the 3d industry yet (but looking for work, email me >.< ).I'm using my own terms so if there's a name for something, please let me know. I've had no education in this field so, again, filter this info at your own judgement. It's just speculations that personally made me better at this.


If you want the TL;DR version, just read the headlines.


Honorable mention to color theory,

as it is good to know (or at least have a general idea of a few key rules to be able to chose your color palettes and your background vs your prop/scene).Lot's of info on that are free everywhere.Now let's get to the subject.

I will be showing 3 examples of some props I did in the past before I tell you my "secret".The reason being that I want you to ask yourselves what is wrong with them, and try to identify the problems yourselves.

So what you see in the picture above is a textured prop I did for an old polycount challenge. What is wrong with it? (I mean, apart from the random lights I placed around, just texture wise). I'll tell you. It looks flat. In other words, there's not enough contrast (and drama, as I like to say, we'll talk a bit about that later). It has all the sculpted details but they are almost not visible from this distance. So here's the first important lesson I learned.


1) Details should be visible from short distance, mid distance, and far distance, each having their own elements.


And that previous image was the "good" render, detail wise. Here are a couple more renders, that completely strip my prop off its baked details. You can clearly see the lack of depth in this texturing.



Another example of a material I made for a project.(Reference top left)

This one has some details, but still... Color wise, it looks like the reference so what is right and what is wrong? The detail is not strong enough. This is a 2k texture, and I went for small details because...pffft, 2k texture, add those small details! But as you see in the top right picture, you can barely view them from that distance.You can see the color variations,you can notice that the forms and lighting make it a bit more interesting, but what about mid distance detail? It is completely non existent. Last example. I already knew here that I needed more contrast in my texturing but I was still trying to implement it in my workflow. In the picture below it was the 2nd time I textured that particular prop, the first attempt was worse than that.

You might see some contrast, you might see some detail, but there are good points and bad points. I want people to know at this point, metals are probably the hardest to texture (in my opinion) becase every metal, has a huge history, from melting, to adding a finish, to weathering. It's good practise to read about different techniques for finishing metals, (or wood) it will help you texture it's details better.

This is the final render. It definitely has contrast. But too much is going on, and the contrast is NOT in the materials themselves. The parts that I was somehow happy with, were the ones in the green circles at the left side of the picture. The pearl material, the scorpion's tail and this lavender-colored material. On the right side of the picture, in the blue circles, there are some attempts of adding eye focal areas in these otherwise "flat" materials. Good thought, poorly executed, but on top of that, there's too much stuff, too many "interresting areas" in this prop. Material wise, though, here's another lesson.

2) Materials should have some focal points,because if they don't exist, the eyes don't know where to look at

Focal points add interrest, or in some form, drama.Careful with the tiling materials though, as they might look repetitive. Talking about drama, all the red circles in the picture above are dramatic points of interest.A few of them are fine if you want to add character to the prop itself but this one has too many and you don't know where to focus.They all clash together, the blood, the energy, the lock,the scorpion's tail, the sprouting tentacle things with the pearls....I wanted to convey the story that the prop was magic, it had life, and some unauthorised person tried to open it so the scorpion cut them.These were not in the original concept so I ran wild with conveying these Ideas and overdid it like, 1000%. So, lesson number 3 for me here.

3) Try to add "drama" in some way, but don't overdo it.


Ok so these rules are nice, but still dont have an actual "technique". They are more like general guidelines on taking decisions through your texturing.

The real gem here that was a complete game changer for me and the thing you could take from this blog post is...

drum roll......

Change everything to black and white values!


Print screen--> paste in photoshop --> rasterize layer --> ctrl+shift+alt+B to make it black and white. Why? Because stripping the color from your albedo or final render, makes your eyes understand the values you need to achieve contrast and make your texturing more interesting. The following picture of the sword is a good example


And the following is a bad example. Notice how this steampunk weapon has different colors, but if you turn it to grayscale, there is literally 1 shade of gray. Boring, where are the rest 49? It's so flat it could join the flat earth society.

Having this technique in mind, it's rather easy to try and achieve contrast with your colors, with how shiny your objects are, the metalness of them and the end result of everything combined. Substance painter is a great tool that can cycle through each one individually, so that it helps you see the contrast in them. As I said in my previous blog post as well, each texture should look great by itself, before combining them all together. If you use this "contrast" concept along with the previously mentioned rules you'll get at least a very decent looking prop.

Important note: Contrast can be negated in texture sets. For example, making a dark object very shiny, might negate its dark color due to reflections.


Important note 02: Contrast via lighting can help break up flat textures, complementing your props.


Here is an example of a prop that has bad textures but interesting result. (can click for full screen, to view better).

The materials in this prop are rather flat, especially the gem material and the bone material (showcased in red circles on the right side of the image). The bronze material, and the wood from the spiked crown, are not great either. The bandages on the lower side have a very bad color compared to the part they are attached to, and that area on the left side in the shadow is barely visible! I won't make excuses, I know I could do better but challenges are...challenging! Especially within time limitations.

However, the prop looks intriguing. Why? It has enough complexity and drama but not too overwhelming, and a nice contrast was achieved through lighting. The yellow circles are areas where I think lighting saved the day, and elevated the prop. So remember that even if your texturing is not very good, not all hope is lost!


Finally there is one part I want to briefly talk about, which is equally important. Say we did all the stuff I mentioned in this post.There is one more thing that can take it a step further, and that is gradience. It can add transitioning, it can create flow and guide your eyes, something like warm colors do (attract your eyes) vs cold colors (that move your eyes away from them).


Remember that contrast works in small areas, but gradience is achieved as a collective.


exhibit A


You can see a nice contrast + gradience in this prop, guiding your eyes to the different parts of it. There is some overall gradience from top to bottom, but can allso be divided into smaller parts. The vignette post process also adds a circle in the render, guiding your eyes in the middle. This final render is the result of repeatedly print-screening my prop, turning it to grayscale, and adjusting the color/roughness/metalic values, to achieve good contrast and overall gradient. There is zero photoshop editing here (well, apart from changing the picture to black and white).

As a quick final tip for this prop on how I chose the background color for the sword, it was because of the 2 main colors of my prop. Red+Yellow. In the color wheel, if you chose blue, it creates a triangle. The value of the blue was adjusted in grayscale to achieve a nice contrast with my prop. Use color theory for taking decisions on your palettes!



So after practising these techniques in a couple of projects, this is my latest portfolio piece. I see myself getting much better with every new project and exploring different styles as well.

_________________________________________________________________________ For this post I'd mostly like to thank Marcus Johnston and his constructive critisism on my work which helped me set up a pipeline and a thought process in texturing. He also has a great tutorial on how he textured this

You can find it here Thank you very much for taking the time to read this,I hope it was worth it. Constructive criticism and requests are kindly appreciated. Toodaloo!


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