New Texture Creation Programs killing Traditional art skills?
polycounter lvl 7
So my main question here is do you think Texture Creation Programs like dDo and Substance Painter are bad in the long run for artists? When I started studying Art Texture painting programs like dDo and Substance Painter didn't exist so we learned more traditional art skills such as layering a texture, material definition and hand painting details with brushes all of which was done by hand in photoshop from source images, details and brushes.
These programs don't really impact on your high and low poly creation skills as your still required to create a high poly either hard surface or sculpted or both through your respective programs (Maya, Max, Zbrush, Mudbox? assuming people still use that for some reason to name a few) which makes you a better artist the more you practice it and is still the main technique used in the industry.
...BUT as far as texture painting (diffuse, spec and gloss) what do you think these programs are making newer artist less reliant on Traditional art skills and more on generated effects?
I try to do as much hand painting and sculpting as I can depending on the requirements of the model but I recently looked into Substance and it looks amazing I just don't want to become reliant on the program because it can make my stuff like a lot better and suffer in the long run because I will have less experience if I'm required to do something else that I can't use substance for
Sorry for long post but this has been on my mind for a long time and I'd love some input from people who are in the same situation or industry experienced professionals
Thanks!
- Carl
These programs don't really impact on your high and low poly creation skills as your still required to create a high poly either hard surface or sculpted or both through your respective programs (Maya, Max, Zbrush, Mudbox? assuming people still use that for some reason to name a few) which makes you a better artist the more you practice it and is still the main technique used in the industry.
...BUT as far as texture painting (diffuse, spec and gloss) what do you think these programs are making newer artist less reliant on Traditional art skills and more on generated effects?
I try to do as much hand painting and sculpting as I can depending on the requirements of the model but I recently looked into Substance and it looks amazing I just don't want to become reliant on the program because it can make my stuff like a lot better and suffer in the long run because I will have less experience if I'm required to do something else that I can't use substance for
Sorry for long post but this has been on my mind for a long time and I'd love some input from people who are in the same situation or industry experienced professionals
Thanks!
- Carl
Replies
You always want to be learning and trying new software, it's always a good thing to have more tools under your belt.
It's not killing art skills, in-fact it's opening doors for some people. Some modelers out there could be great at SubD but terrible at texturing, and so these programs allow them to build the confidence to explore their abilities...
If you are the type of artist who's only capable of doing drone work, then yes you are in trouble. But I assume we all aspire to be more than that.
Do you waste time in Photoshop layering on textures, juggling between 40 different layers, blending styles, effects, iterating changes between different maps.
Or do you turn to one of the many tools like dDo or SP to clear up a lot of fluffing about so you can really fine tune your asset AND get it done on time to please said art director.
There's still plenty of traditional art that programs haven't automated yet, for me it lets me put more time into more important aspects of an asset, like design.
One of the huge advantages of these kinds of tools is the consistency.
Imagine you've got a level with 30 different pieces of machinery in it. Now you want all those pieces to be consistent in the way they reflect and what colours they are to make the overall composition work with the art direction.
With the traditional way you can run into problems between multiple artists where everyone has a slightly different style and different ways of doing things which can make the assets inconsistent and break the art direction.
With something like substance designer you can simply just pass the SBS files around between artists and everything will look exactly the same. It's also faster and requires less supervision.
Not really. It's not because you're re-using the existing presets that makes it consistent. It's the ability to make your own presets and pass them to others within your team that enables consistency. There's no reason why you're stuck with using the default presets.
And when I say it requires less supervision - I mean you can simply say to an artist "use this preset I made" rather than having to inspect (or edit) every asset that's been made for consistency.
It's very similar to how a hobbyist would pick up one of Unreal 4's blueprint game templates and then claim they are a game programmer.
These programs are only bad if they are being used as a substitute for traditional art skills. But that would be a failure on the teacher, not the student.
Tutorial videos/teachers geared at beginning artists need to show the traditional method before providing the use of the programs.
Sure you get pissed finding out that 8 hour process you did could be done in half the time. But see, now you've been suckled on the traditional art titty. Now you can mix your self-developed workflow INTO those awesome DDO cowhide presets so generously and procedurally provided.
It's only bad in the long run if we teach and promote the bad.
You still do that in Substance. You can't expect to just double click the material presets and be done with it.
Artists should understand that the more you automate the workflow,the better you become at focusing on what really matters.For texturing,it can be hitting a shortcut and scratches (with zillions of parameters) will be smartly generated and can be saved to be used across your other objects.
For modeling,it can be creating complex models without focusing on cleaning your mesh after a boolean operation.
Now without experience,you can't do super models just because you have Mesh Fusion,and you can't be a texture artist just because you know how to create a texture within DDO.All these programs need user feedback,and the easier they become,the harder it is to actually create awesome art that doesn't look like some Substance/DDO template.
This awesome vehicle by Tor Frick (done in ten fu**ing hours ! ) is what i think of when i see people talking about automation,not the random textures that suspiciously look like something I've seen before.
At the end of the day you can't polish a turd.
yes, you do, but still many of it is automated.
in the end, it's all about speed. If your art director want to change something it's easier to make with Substance or Quixel than redo tons of things.
My impression is that it's just a starting point for creating your art. Like a lot of it is hand drawn anyway.
But if you were also using base textures from random sources and manipulating them in Photoshop, like basic brick ect then what's the difference, really?
It's funny to hear you say "traditional art skills" like layering and manipulating images in photoshop ect because i started with paint and canvas in the 80's.
I haven't painted anything in that long, but it was my first job and i made a living. But if NDo is cheating, then photoshop is cheating.
When i first saw photoshop or it was paintshop pro actually i was like, you can make a picture that looks like it was painted by Michael Angelo himself without ever lifting an actual paintbrush in your life! I was like, man, this is so cheap. What's going to happen to "real" art?
Then about that same time, many years ago this was, my mother sold a painting for 250 bucks that she painted in like 5 hours as something to do with a friend of hers on a whim ( she's a great artist though she hadn't painted in forever before that ) and i was like, Ah, it's still appreciated, maybe it will be even more appreciated in the modern age.
Still anything digital is already like, fleeting in general. Like I'm not particularly impressed with "renders". I can appreciate like an original piece for presentation, and if it's really really creative then cool. It has it's uses, but if it's just a render of something like a car or gun that already exists, shrug.
Even photography feels cheapened. What used to take thousands of dollars of lenses and massive talent and knowledge of light and combined with a good eye and a bit of luck is like, meh, snap a pic while walking by, snap a few what the hell i got gigs of space. And they are in HDR and look fantastic, lol.
I took pictures of my sisters wedding a few months back on my phone that look nearly as good as the professional photographer she hired. And i had them that day.
I get the artist mind, and i appreciate skill and relentless quality ect, in fact i struggle with it, "it's not good enough" "I didn't bleed enough".
But that's the difference between the "starving artist" and the one who makes a living. Because while yeah it's art, and it's fulfilling your need for creative outlet, and it's just so, and you created it from your soul and mixed your blood and tears with moon dust and created this masterpiece. It's probably not filling your belly. Most people don't care. Most people listen to pop music while amazing musicians with mindblowing talent go unheard by the masses.
...but you can roll it in Glitter :poly142:
Have you ever see a good rocks + moss cover, ground and ground cover, sky/clouds, plants/foliage textures. Even a nice cracked stone or asphalt surface is pretty hard to do. They would cry out loud : procedural and artificial.
What I saw mostly from those new program generation is quickly done stylized art.
I would say neither Photoshop , no new generation are convenient.
I see some promise only from Quixel megascan (looks cool on their site) but have my hopes not very high since a good material is not only scan. You could scan to microbe level and get ugly repetitive and very artificial result.
ps. I would say a true revolution would occur if some new program would appear that would help to work with scanned materials. Compose them, crop, blend adjust in real time having live links to hires sources . Paint randomly scattered details. Both texture and geometric.
Here is a wood texture created with Substance Designer,by Jemerie Noguer :
This texture is completely procedural,but i don't think it's noticeable,and while doing a wood texture is not the hardest task in Photoshop,you can't have the level of control Substance gives you in any other texturing software imho.Generating quintillions of different wood textures just by changing your random seed,or adding more/less dirt on the wood,etc...
This is the power of procedural technology combined with knowledge of how texturing works.
Here is a cracked Asphalt texture i made in Designer in less than 3 hours.It's all procedural,and i can have as many variations as i want without having to repaint everything by hand.I'm not super proud of the end result and should have spent more time working on it,but i think it's pretty solid for a start and can only imagine what it would look like if I had spent more time working on it.
I don't think the Quixel Suite,Photoshop and Substance Designer are comparable.I always use the Quixel Suite or just Photoshop with custom operations for hard surface.Substance for tilleable texture,and Photoshop for what i want it to do (mainly between Substance and Quixel).
Also it's getting pretty hard when you need a texture covering not just one square meter , but rather 10 meters. Procedural details begin to looks kind of too uniform.
I prefer to compose from photo/ scanned materials and ad just a few procedural covering like a few extra scratches and dirt spots here and there. Too bad Substance designer is not suited well for such kind of approach. It's composing abilities even worse than Photoshop one.
Too bad also they killed possibilities to hand tweak/compose procedural details that existed in their old free Map Zone. It was their core feature imo. I was so disappointed when bought first Designer and didn't find it there
I cannot recall a single time I have ever used a preset provided by either company that wasn't either heavily altered in some way, or only used for a placeholder mesh.
On top of that making your own presets requires just as much traditional art skills as it does in Photoshop, along with a huge amount of new technical skills for people to master. Especially when you consider that one of the main benefits of these programs has been to help the industry transition to the new PBR shader models.
The problem isn't specific to procedural textures at all and can easily be countered the same way it would when handling it with a hand painted texture in Photoshop.
I don't get this claim at all. This can be done super quick in substance designer (even easier if you include painter into your workflow) and would take just about as many nodes as you would need layers in Photoshop.
Plus easy quick crop/copy/paste/ blur the edges tools without a lot of extra nodes. Something like in Fusion maybe.
Color, form and composition are just us much a part of my daily Substance work as anything else. A simple example is one of abstracting and isolating forms, just as you would in traditional sculpture. Those principles ALWAYS guide my substance height map creation workflow.
Plus easy quick crop/copy/paste/ blur the edges tools without a lot of extra nodes. Something like in Fusion maybe.
Substance Designer still needs some of Photoshop features (like the super basic text) to be a complete texturing package,but for now the way you control your parameters in Substance is uncomparable to the very destructive workflow of Photoshop.
I've heard here and there that Allegorithmic is working on a tech/workflow way to create nodes (they currently use mostly FX-Map and Pixel Processor AFAIK) and it will be interesting to see what they will be creating in the (near ?) futur.
One example from the Remaking the Art of Halo 2 for Xbox One - GDC Talk is the covenant materials. All of their weapons, characters, and vehicles use a lot of the same materials. Covenant metal, covenant hex pattern, covenant plastic, etc. If the art director says in the game the hex pattern needs more bump, or needs to be scaled up, or it's too purple, you can literally change the referenced material for 100+ assets and re-export them all at once.
In photohshop you would have to open up each texture, go to the hex pattern layer, and adjust the opacity from 4% to 8%, re save, and go to the next texture. Maybe if there is some strict layer structure you could make a macro for it, but if that structure isn't right, you'll have to fix a bunch that were broken. And if the PSD file for the texture had some of the layers you need to adjust flattened, you'll have to do it by hand.
The beauty of substance designer is that you can make a "blur the edges" graph for yourself, and re-use it.
A lot of what you describe are just hangups of working with photoshop, you sir can keep juggling layers, but I'm not doing that shit anymore.
I once tried to replicate cool Fusion merge node with ability to combine/ intersecting Z depth of scanned texture fragments. Did a Gordian knot in Substance and it still didn't work.
So why compare it to Photoshop? Why not to other node based soft?
But their transform node does allow to to change the pivot point and scale/rotate from that point. You don't need more than the basic Transform 2D node. Cropping and slicing are done easily with things like the Transform 2D node as well, using pretty much the same exact controls as PS, but in a non destructive manner.
Because it largely fills the role of photoshop in a texturing workflow. Node based software is all over the place in utility, should I compare it to blueprints from UE4? It's like asking to compare Substance Painter to modeling software just because you work in a 3D environment and not a 2D environment like many other texturing tools.
No offense but this seriously is just proving my earlier post about how most complaints I see for the software come from ignorance of the software.
So I guess the transform gizmo in the transform-2d node doesn't scale towards the pivot and the pivot doesn't snap to the transform handles. Sure, it could be made better but it gets the job done, and is by no means a deal breaker.
There is no traditional crop tool in substance designer, but if you try to use it as photo manipulation software, you might as well stick to photoshop. Its a different way of thinking, that thing you want to precisely crop won't be in the same position when the texture is randomized.
I haven't used Fusion, thus don't really know what the merge node does. Whatever it does do... I'm pretty sure someone who is good at substance can probably replicate it. There are lots of cool things I don't know how to do in substance designer, but I don't write off the software because I can't get it to work.
I mentioned photoshop because your previous posts seemed to talk about going in manually to do XYZ, and hand tweaking etc...
There isn't much else like substance on the market, maybe filter forge and even then it isn't geared to the same stuff. You mention fusion, but that is a compositing app, not suited to 3d and doesn't really care about things tiling.
Slicing with transform 2d node without such functionality is a huge pain. Still the slicing is very regular operation in texture creation when you have one big master file and have to slice to a number of actual tiling textures that share partly some details across its borders.
As of merge node in Fusion I meant its "perform depth merge" option when you could make a depth intersection of two layers. Say stone plates and wavy sand for example, the way sand waves would cover stone and accumulate in deep parts and cracks according to both things depth info. I do so in Zbrush 2,5D layers almost in every my texture. It's actually possible in Substance Designer too but inconvenient like hell , no better than doing same in Photoshop.
In fact I do need a composing tool mostly , just working withing single frame. A thing where I could compose photoscanned fragments easily. And Substance Designer doesn't help here but rather creates extra troubles.
I actually use Filter forge a lot. It has one very big advantage over Substance designer. It allows to re-scale and transform procedural noises easily keeping them true tilable automatically.
The Procedural aspect also comes into account,and so there are things that you can't do like you would in Photoshop,you have to instead change your workflow to have more control on your procedural textures.
It's always been a battle between quality and the time it takes to create assets before any deadline.
I mean I guess not having these functionalities can be a pain, you are describing doing photo manipulation.... but with scanned textures. This isn't really what substance designer was intended to do, and even with photoshop which has all the destructive tools you love can't deal with doing all those operations on each channel (albedo, gloss, height etc...)
This is very easy in substance designer, it is actually how pebbles, grass, leaves etc... are blended together.
??? You can scale and transform all procedural noises in substance designer, and they stay tileable. You actually have to really go out of your way to make something not tile in substance designer.
As of stay tilable, they do but only with one huge limitation. The texture should be square shaped. Ones you need it 2x1 or 4x1 everything is getting stretched and only easy way without re-scaling the noise from very deep beginning is to use transform 2d after which it's no more tileable. And I have not a single square shaped environment texture for many years already. Filter Forge is tileble by default with any form factor
If you don't understand what makes a good texture then Substance and Quixel will just help you make bad textures quicker, and as a result most likely accelerate the learning process.
Photoshop was never that great for making textures, it was just the only thing most of us had.
I'm sure there are better ways of doing this, and some of the extra levels nodes are just for control.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10105386/pc/Height%20Blend.sbs
And the noises tile fine for me in different aspect ratio textures.
Many creative industry's are crapping themselves due to the advancement of technology and I for one am loving it (I can't draw for shit but I know how to texture without quixel & substance).
I think we are all going to evolve or die :poly121:
Why is it that these " topics " only come up about ART and in the interim we have no complaints or qualms about our 3d software killing traditional "modeling skills".
It's a stupid argument if you ask me and you can apply it across the board, what are we going to worry about next? that Google driver-less cars are going to take away the Traditional car driving experience.
Come on guys, the times are changing :thumbup:
Best example I saw is Blender Z combine node having anti-aliased mask checkbox and working with exr files input and true non normalized depth info.
I would wanted it also for each stone (scanned from photoscan) separately. So I could tweak(compose) them by hand. Had what I called Gordian knot in result.
As of noises they do tile fine being stretched following the aspect ratio. That stretching is the problem. Filter forge has easy quick fix for that.
I don't think Photoshop is better , it's awful actually. But Substance Designer is somehow disappointing too and didn't have easy quick solutions for a number of very key things imo
Still, not for me. Though Substance Painter seems great. And I really like dDo for base textures, though I've been staying away from it lately, to push myself to improve.
Anyway, short answer, no, new tools won't kill old skills, unless they deserve to die.
And even with those tools around, productions or their final output only became more and more complex, what speed up here, will give you time somewhere else.
And PBR aside, painting directly on your model is beautiful.