[WIP] Brick texture and more...

[Zizka]

Hello,
I'm looking for suggestions as how to make the brick texture look better on the building at the top.



Thank you!

[eishiya]

I think it'd look less noisy without the shading. Bricks are pretty flat, the shadows are very small and would not be visible as this scale.

This is more of a taste thing, but I personally think having a distinct mortar colour and having every brick visible tends to look noisy, overwhelming, while also being kind of boring, since it's a constant mass of detail. I prefer to take the cartoonier approach and have a solid-colour wall with a few isolated bricks, e.g.

[Zizka]

I've fixed the bricks, it does look better without mortar.

What could I do for the side walls to look more 3D as opposed two 2 panes? Any suggestions anyone?

[eishiya]

I'm don't understand your question, so my feedback probably won't answer it

Your diagonal side wall bricks are smaller than your front-facing bricks, they're just one pixel tall xP You may want to fix that.

You can do a bit of a mix of rectangles to stepped shapes to help sell the intended perspective, all the bricks being stepped shapes makes the wall look angled different from what the bottom outline should suggest. Alternatively, you could make the bottom outline match the perspective suggested by your bricks.

Unrelated tip: consider getting rid of all the bottom outlines on objects that are meant to be firmly planted on the ground, or are rising out of it, such as the building, trees, the barrel, etc. Bottom outlines create the look of a cast shadow, making the object look slightly disconnected from the ground. Of course, having overlapping grass, bits of concrete, etc like you have on the little grey rocks in addition to this would look even better.

[Zizka]

Hello eishiya,

I understood everything in your message (good point, especially regarding the outline which I never thought about before) except for this paragraph:

You can do a bit of a mix of rectangles to stepped shapes to help sell the intended perspective, all the bricks being stepped shapes makes the wall look angled different from what the bottom outline should suggest. Alternatively, you could make the bottom outline match the perspective suggested by your bricks.

Could you clarify a bit please?

[eishiya]

The top line is the perspective suggested by your brick shapes, the bottom line is the perspective suggested by the bottom of the building:

See how they're not the same angle, even though they should be?

The easiest (but perhaps less appealing?) solution is to make the bottom of this part of the building have the same 45 degree angle as the bricks.
If you want to try changing the bricks instead, here's one possibility:

(The bricks are 2px wide here instead of 3 because of foreshortening, since we're seeing them at an angle.)

[pistachio]

Maybe eishya caught some of this stuff but I'm seeing these problems, so I wanted to do a take on it...

There are a few things in this crop I messed with here.



One wall I made a full out brick texture, skewed. Did a rough tiling job. More realistic way but time consuming and the detail can be distracting, depends.

Other wall I winged it, it's a stripped down version of this. This is totally broken and won't tile w/o cleanup, just wanted to show alternative that fits in more with yours.

A good key to this (2nd texture): Borders are a cheap way to add detail. It's one of the places where the contrast is, contrast is what eyeballs get drawn to, power of suggestion. You can have wastelands of blank space, add 2 details around borders and it can work. But a lot of your borders are flat. Look at what I did w/ the weeds between grass and bricks. So something is missing is there and transition tiles like this probably are gonna fix it.

IDK if it's a broken-down projects (possible) but if it is this there's a lot more I would change too. You can make it look rough but still cartoony.

Edited a tree. Work on your trees bro!

[Zizka]

Alright, I understand now, thanks.

I'm currently in the process of making the changes but if you have any other comments pistachio I'd love to hear them. That way I can show the next version with all the changes implemented.

Thanks for the helpful critique by the way.

EDIT: It is broken down, yes.

EDIT2: This is what I had done before I got pistachio's reply:

[Zizka]

Bump.