Texturing Workflow Question

DallanP

So when you go about texturing realistic assets for real time using a painting software like Substance/Quixel/3D coat, do you texture the high poly then bake all your maps down to the low poly? Or do you bake your maps for your low poly and then texture your low poly? I have done both ways, but run into problems with baking maps with texturing the high poly, and also run into difficulty when texturing the low poly when the material changes mid UV island/geometry. (Like leather straps across a characters chest with only one continuous geometry element)

If you have a completely different pipeline or any great resources please post!

Thanks!

Bek

Texturing the highpoly isn't generally done for game-art. Unless using ptex or vertex colours, you'd have to unwrap the highpoly which would be tedious and a huge waste of time. You'd also lose some quality when resampling the textures when baking, though I've never tested how much of an issue that is. There are some specific uses for highpoly to lowpoly textures, but they're far from typical.

To be clear information like ambient occlusion, normals, and curvature would typically be baked from the highpoly to the low and requires no highpoly UV's (though you can bake simple AO just using your low geo or convert your normal map to a curvature map + more using software like Knald). When you speak of baking "textures" from the high to low it's going to be assumed you mean diffuse information, which isn't commonly done.

In the case of material types changing, you're either going to need enough texel density for the transition to hold up (straight edges to reduce aliasing will help here) or you're going to need to use extra geometry + separate that uv island for a clean and sharp edge between those materials, which can be particularly important at lower mips. To use your leather strap example, you might make that a separate element that sits infront of the characters clothing, which uses a bit more geo but gives you more options with the UV's and textures. As a bonus it's also simple to remove that geo in a lower LOD of the mesh, so the extra geo isn't as expensive as you might first think.

Cay

ID Maps are pretty common.. instead of texturing your high poly you assign the different materials colors and bake that down to serve as a mask.

Synaesthesia

Hey Dallanp!

We have a lot of resources and tutorials located at Quixel.se/learn which cover the entire process of using Quixel Suite, from model preparation, UVs, normal generation, and texture painting. If you have specific questions about our software, please don't hesitate to ask me!