Best way to make textures?

Bletzkarn

I know there's many ways to make textures and I just wanted to know what other people's opinions are on making textures and to clear up any assumptions I have. I more talking about materials to be applied to world geometry rather than making them for models/uv. So here is a list of what I think are the different ways.

Bitmap2Material

Basically just taking a photograph and running it through a program like B2M or Crazy Bump.

Pro's:

- Quick and Easy

Con's:

- Lack of control
- Lack of consistency

Photoshop "hand-painted"

Hand Painting a material to either looked stylized or adding textured photos to make it look real

Pro's:

- Good control of shape and colour
- Good control of height maps / layering

Con's:

- Time consuming
- Requires artistic skill / strong knowledge of material properties.

Substance Designer


Pro's:

- High levels of control
- High levels of variability

Con's:

- Large Investment to create original substance
- Time Consuming.

Zbrush Bake n Paint

Pro's:

- High levels of control and high levels of quality

Con's:

- Time consuming
- Requires mad skills

To be honest I want to invest my skills in hand painting height maps / base colours in photoshop and using alpha layers and the like to build up realism in the texture. Despite photographs being based on real life the textures often end up washed out some "over-exageration" in the texture seems to work better in game environments. I also love the zbrush method it creates beautiful textures but for instance I have to make ~30 world textures in 6 weeks among other duties and that method isn't going to cut it.

So my question is do people in Industry still paint textures or is not worth investing time and effort, or do people prefer procedural textures these days? Any advice would be awesome, thanks.

WarrenM

"It depends".  

There's no real answer here, it depends entirely on the game aesthetic and the established pipelines.

More companies are exploring Substance these days but I know a lot of artists who still hand assemble in Photoshop after initial bakes.

Ged

yeah really depends on art style and your current pipeline. My current plan for realistic/semi-stylised work is substance designer for large scale environment work eg tiling textures and making materials, then either substance painter or designer for individual assets eg props and hero assets and characters. Finally photoshop for tweaks once textures are in engine. This is way faster than my old way of doing it all in zbrush and photoshop and just iterating until it looks good.

battlecow

If you only rely on quixel or substance to texture you are pretty useless in my opinion. You should be able to  texture at the same quality level by hand in photoshop because you need the understanding and because the other tools might not be available. There are no shortcuts, texturing is often the most time consuming part of a model. Knowing how to texture in photoshop is the base requirement I'm afraid and you should learn zbrush/quixel/painter/substance as well
 

ExcessiveZero

battlecow said:

If you only rely on quixel or substance to texture you are pretty useless in my opinion. You should be able to  texture at the same quality level by hand in photoshop because you need the understanding and because the other tools might not be available. There are no shortcuts, texturing is often the most time consuming part of a model. Knowing how to texture in photoshop is the base requirement I'm afraid and you should learn zbrush/quixel/painter/substance as well
 

I somehow doubt it will be as important in the future given the results achievable in substance painter or even quixel now it has integrated 3D painting, of course using photoshop in General is always going to be a plus and I can't foresee a time a program like photoshop will cease to be used (you even use it with quixel), but this seems to me the next evolution in texturing and it is starting to make pure photoshop unless you are doing just tilables and tweaks, look very dated.

 even great hand painted Artists like Justin Meisse use 3D coat I believe.

battlecow

Maybe, but I was just merely telling the OP that in my opinion it was worth learning all the texturing techniques and that photoshop was the foundation,  being able to create a good material/texture from scratch in photoshop will give you understanding and greater control over your textures in substance or even Mari. Why would you want to remove photoshop from your workflow? it's awesome and cheap....and it syncs with all the great apps like 3dcoat and even Zbrush. 
Handpainting is a totally different beast.

CreativeSheep

I do everything hand painted with some mudbox.  Photoshop is powerful, with the right workflow and tools it can do alot and as mentioned you have control over the material properties, regardless if you do game textures or TV / Film Textures; Photoshop is a beast, everyone knows the basics, selections and the brush tool etc but spend a considerable amount of time in the program for a long time and you'll come to appreciate it.

juggulator

battlecow said:

If you only rely on quixel or substance to texture you are pretty useless in my opinion. You should be able to  texture at the same quality level by hand in photoshop because you need the understanding and because the other tools might not be available. There are no shortcuts, texturing is often the most time consuming part of a model. Knowing how to texture in photoshop is the base requirement I'm afraid and you should learn zbrush/quixel/painter/substance as well
 

I can both agree and disagree with this but just my opinion. PBR exists because there are rules/principles that materials have to follow such as energy conservation and BDRF. I can see creating organic/natural textures like stone and grass as handpainted in Photoshop but Substance Designer has specific PBR utility nodes such as Albedo and Metallness validation which is very useful for materials that blend metals and dielectrics. As Substance Designer is procedural you have control over every aspect of the material properties as well. For me the thing is I could create textures in PS but being able to use a color map to apply multiple full PBR materials to individual areas of a single shader mesh is something I've yearned for. Your point about learning them all is sound advice. I have all the substance/quixel programs and photoshop and for me it's about using each for what "I" feel theirs strengths are as well as the best ways to use them together, which can very with each model. Zbrush is my new found love though. I slept on it because for the longest time I figured it was a strictly sculpting program, comparing it to Mudbox. Boy was I wrong! Between Nanomesh, Fibermesh, and Dynamesh, I was sold.4R7 is "literally" God's gift to digital artists however I wouldn't just completely drop modeling in Maya as I am deeply rooted in polygon modeling. Zbrush is that next step up for me, opeing the door to be able to easily create convincingly complex models. As an artist I can be very particular about feeling like a program "does it all for me" as there is extensive knowledge and skill required but if there are features that can help speed up the process I think anyone can in any field of art or design would gladly welcome it.