Hi everyone. I'm Pieceful and this is my first thread here. I've been a lurker for some time and I'm an old-school Minecraft fan. I stopped playing for a few years but now I am back
Due to some health issues, I've been unable to sleep very well - and to deal with my insomnia I have started to design a texture pack. I am currently two days into the designing but I have been making steady progress.
I plan to make a complete replacement for 1.12.2 textures and then I may move on to mod support.
My pack is a mixture of photo based realistic textures with hand drawn elements and tweaks. I will record a diary of my progress here for those interested.
Any recommendations, contributions or tips are welcome.
First stage(5th August 2018)
Crafting bench, Stone, Cobblestone, Stone bricks, Carved stone (Hammer & Chisel), Vanilla Minecraft ore set, sand. Other related textures are still being tinkered with ie sandstone etc.
Let me start by airing my biases: I don't care for photo-realistic packs at all. I always get an uncanny valley effect from them. The natural textures imposed onto the harshly cubic world of Minecraft is off-putting to me. I note this because if it seems like I'm down on something, it's fair that you should be able to discern whether I'm being down because the texture actually needs work, or if it's because I just don't like the style. In the former case you can then decide how you want to approach improving your work, while in the later case you can disregard my opinions.
Fair? Groovy.
Your biggest strength is clearly man-made objects. That crafting table is BEAUTIFUL! I'm guessing you used textures from sites like ImageAfter and then combined them with a bit of hand shading to make those textures. Textbook way of making textures, but you do it really well. The same goes for the stone bricks which are expertly made and quite beautiful. I can't get a good look at the cobblestone, but I'm guessing that probably has some of the problems I'm going to talk about in a minute. Aside of that, though, it looks very good. I'm guessing that symbol is hand drawn and then imposed onto your stone texture. A bit of a stand out style wise, but it still looks great!
And now we get to the second image and the natural textures and we see where your inexperience working with Minecraft shows through. Based on what you've done I'm guessing you're used to working on larger 3d areas. The reason that I say this is because the repeating on the natural textures is PAINFULLY obvious. The sand has a highlight that repeats every row and the stone is WAY worse with that dark band down the center. Like I said, I'm guessing that the cobblestone probably has obvious repeats as well but I can't see it clearly enough in the screenshot to tell whether it does or not.
When making natural textures, its your job to fool your audience into thinking that there aren't any repeats. When you leave details that the eye can easily track the repetitive nature of the textures shows through and breaks the illusion. Humans are, in general, really good at seeing patterns. At lower resolution the pixilated nature of the textures can be used to fool the eye somewhat to mask the repetition. At higher resolutions like what you're working at you lose this advantage, and so have to be extra sure to disguise the repeats in some way.
A final note is the ores. I strongly dislike them. It looks like someone suspended colorful stones in glue and then cut straight through it to expose them again. Neat art project, but not good for a natural look. Ore should discolor and deform the surrounding stone. You're clearly going for a very smooth, polished stone. That's totally fine, but if there's one place you should break from this it's the ores. The ore chunks should have depth and shading and the surrounding stone should look damaged or bumpy in some way as though someone had to physically break through it to expose the valuable material beneath the stone. Materials in the ground also don't come in neat little chunks. While it's fine to have some big spots to make the block identifiable, if you're going the photo-real route you should have some marbling with the surrounding stone. Bits of 'dust' for lack of a better word that are separate from the nuggets.
As stated, this pack isn't for me. Still, I hope some of my advice will prove useful to you none the less. You've got some good stuff with the man-made blocks. You really just need to work on your natural ones.
One thing to notice on the bricks, the lines don't match within the same block, even when the bricks are parallel. You might want to get a 'special' cube model for this block, mirroring UV on one face to fix this.
EDIT: well you can scratch that, it appears to missmatch on both sides, so it might me a pure texture issue.
Hi everyone. I'm Pieceful and this is my first thread here. I've been a lurker for some time and I'm an old-school Minecraft fan. I stopped playing for a few years but now I am back
Due to some health issues, I've been unable to sleep very well - and to deal with my insomnia I have started to design a texture pack. I am currently two days into the designing but I have been making steady progress.
I plan to make a complete replacement for 1.12.2 textures and then I may move on to mod support.
My pack is a mixture of photo based realistic textures with hand drawn elements and tweaks. I will record a diary of my progress here for those interested.
Any recommendations, contributions or tips are welcome.
First stage (5th August 2018)
Crafting bench, Stone, Cobblestone, Stone bricks, Carved stone (Hammer & Chisel), Vanilla Minecraft ore set, sand. Other related textures are still being tinkered with ie sandstone etc.
Let me start by airing my biases: I don't care for photo-realistic packs at all. I always get an uncanny valley effect from them. The natural textures imposed onto the harshly cubic world of Minecraft is off-putting to me. I note this because if it seems like I'm down on something, it's fair that you should be able to discern whether I'm being down because the texture actually needs work, or if it's because I just don't like the style. In the former case you can then decide how you want to approach improving your work, while in the later case you can disregard my opinions.
Fair? Groovy.
Your biggest strength is clearly man-made objects. That crafting table is BEAUTIFUL! I'm guessing you used textures from sites like ImageAfter and then combined them with a bit of hand shading to make those textures. Textbook way of making textures, but you do it really well. The same goes for the stone bricks which are expertly made and quite beautiful. I can't get a good look at the cobblestone, but I'm guessing that probably has some of the problems I'm going to talk about in a minute. Aside of that, though, it looks very good. I'm guessing that symbol is hand drawn and then imposed onto your stone texture. A bit of a stand out style wise, but it still looks great!
And now we get to the second image and the natural textures and we see where your inexperience working with Minecraft shows through. Based on what you've done I'm guessing you're used to working on larger 3d areas. The reason that I say this is because the repeating on the natural textures is PAINFULLY obvious. The sand has a highlight that repeats every row and the stone is WAY worse with that dark band down the center. Like I said, I'm guessing that the cobblestone probably has obvious repeats as well but I can't see it clearly enough in the screenshot to tell whether it does or not.
When making natural textures, its your job to fool your audience into thinking that there aren't any repeats. When you leave details that the eye can easily track the repetitive nature of the textures shows through and breaks the illusion. Humans are, in general, really good at seeing patterns. At lower resolution the pixilated nature of the textures can be used to fool the eye somewhat to mask the repetition. At higher resolutions like what you're working at you lose this advantage, and so have to be extra sure to disguise the repeats in some way.
A final note is the ores. I strongly dislike them. It looks like someone suspended colorful stones in glue and then cut straight through it to expose them again. Neat art project, but not good for a natural look. Ore should discolor and deform the surrounding stone. You're clearly going for a very smooth, polished stone. That's totally fine, but if there's one place you should break from this it's the ores. The ore chunks should have depth and shading and the surrounding stone should look damaged or bumpy in some way as though someone had to physically break through it to expose the valuable material beneath the stone. Materials in the ground also don't come in neat little chunks. While it's fine to have some big spots to make the block identifiable, if you're going the photo-real route you should have some marbling with the surrounding stone. Bits of 'dust' for lack of a better word that are separate from the nuggets.
As stated, this pack isn't for me. Still, I hope some of my advice will prove useful to you none the less. You've got some good stuff with the man-made blocks. You really just need to work on your natural ones.
One thing to notice on the bricks, the lines don't match within the same block, even when the bricks are parallel. You might want to get a 'special' cube model for this block, mirroring UV on one face to fix this.
EDIT: well you can scratch that, it appears to missmatch on both sides, so it might me a pure texture issue.
I'm a fan of photorealistic, but I appreciate Alvoria's commentary; very balanced and encouraging.
I LOVE the chest, and the overall feel of the atmosphere.