Tiling photo scanned materials
polycounter lvl 9
I did some traveling this weekend and loaded up on pictures of various surfaces for photo scanning. I plan to get home after work today and hit the process but I'd like to get a heads up on the tiling hurdle. Is there a software that does a good job of setting images up to tile (something like Bitmap2Material?) or is the classic "by hand" approach using alphas in Photoshop still the best route?
Replies
Put on some good music and make yourself a cup of tea and the "manual Photoshop process" will be over in no time!
As for manual adjustment, @EliasWick brings up Photoshop, but I'd say something like 3DCoat or Substance Painter would work much better. They handle multiple channels (normal, height, albedo, gloss etc) at once when clonestamping, and you can paint on a plane with a few tiles on it, so there's no need for using the offset filter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMSOXApFZJc Looks very efficient, thanks.
EDIT: Took a long at that Painter video Elias cited. It looks super cool for assets but does it account for the offset filter in Photoshop?
You either paint in the 2D Editor, which can optionally display endless tiling (and allows you to paint across the edges), or you use a plane with 9 (or so) square tiles, all mapped to the same UV range.
3DCoat comes with one, but if Substance Painter doesn't, it's something you could create in a few seconds tops.
These packages handle UV seams nicely, so you can just paint across the edges and it'll all look fine.
Definitely give Designer 6 a look as well for a less manual option. They both have demos, and you can get them together with Substance B2M and Substance Source in the Substance Live package (which is rent to own).
Froyok Froyok Froyok | koyorF koyorF koyorF
Or do you mean their different lighting angle "scans" ? Imo it works ok only for very limited kinds of materials with tiny depth amplitude.
For true photoscanned materials like ones done with Photoscan or Reality Capture with true depth channel I would recommend patch tool in Affinity Photo (mac version). Works better than Photoshop one imo.
The clone tool is viewport based. It's a technical limitation imposed by 3D Meshes, because otherwise you could try to clone the back of a mesh in the front, and if you reach an angle we are unable to determine what to do. So for a plane it might seem to work, but in other case it doesn't.
If you don't mind, I'm also confused about how this works with ambient occlusion as well. Looking on forums, it appears the fill layers don't support an AO channel so the recommended method is to add a fill layer, plug the AO into "base color", and choose the correct blending mode? Unfortunately when I use the clone tool, I'm baking the AO into the base color so the final output is not lit correctly. Worse, without the fill layer including a designated AO channel, I don't know how to properly export AO.
I'd love some help tackling this as well.
Just click on the "+" sign and add the ambient occlusion.
The key thing is adapting so the copied fragment could be fused in natural way, following middle and macro frequency details. Just cloning is never working right actually, especially on height and normal maps. You get kind of seamless texture but it's often still repetitive as hell and actual faked surface geometry is messed a lot. So the actual problem of tiling photo scans is much bigger than simply cloning.
Substance Designer approaches are just that cloning, nothing more. It works only for what they show in example videos , mostly flat surfaces with only high frequency tiny details, with any middle and macro frequencies being hi-passed out while with photo-scanned materials they are equally important and should be managed very carefully to keep that natural look.
I do use SD often but for me everything Allgorithmic doing is like from another universe with another game industry. They somehow make a lot of things I would never need and never do what I actually need , even kill features I loved. Like ability to manually compose noise patterns in their old Map Zone.
There is still no software on the market that would cover all tiling texture needs imo. They all have lots of huge gaps draining your time to work around.
As you can see there is a cloning layer and a source layer. The cloning layer (layer 1) contains both the cloned strokes and the paint strokes.
And this angled light. How I supposed to do it outside, to capture walls, ground, whatever? There is no scanners on the market, there is even no tutorials about it...
Overall I'm sceptic. Regular 'photogrammetry' workflow seems to be easier and better.
As of "clone patch" my problem is it's just a clone tool and nothing more. Would it adapt a patch to surrounding pixels it would be totally different story. It's especially important for depth and normal channels.
Somehow both Substance programs , while having a lot of conveniences, at the same time manage to miss the very important tools available in old traditional image editors. With Substance Painter too. Evey time I want to project a scanned texture to an object I do it in very archaic Photoshop 3d mode. Photoshop is only soft where it's possible to deform and match the projected image to model very precisely up to per pixel level.
BringMeASunkist I have no idea why you are getting those white gaps but just would like to point. Would it be ok and no gaps, your texture would still be repetitive as hell. To make it right you actually have to either hi-pass it up to something unspecific and unrecognizable or rather re-compose fragments with proper adaptation, scale matching, easy deforming etc.
I have been waiting for a proper tool for that during couple decades already and unfortunately nobody have bothered to make it yet.
I was able to get a pretty decent result with the clone tool, I think. Basically I sourced corners from different stones to interrupt visual repetition, paying attention to height differences. Then blending them with low flow and opacity values.
It was a real pain in the ass because SP2 doesn't have a "preview" for the clone stamp, like photoshop does, and once you've click down then the source is always relevant to your cursor. What that means is that if I click to begin the cloning and find out a corner is not perfectly aligned, I have to reselect my source and try again. That back and forth is truly tedious and I'd love to see it get improved. But otherwise it's a pretty decent tool. I'll tag @Froyok for that software request.
It also probably doesn't help that I chose a project that has a very obvious pattern and requires way too much precision to try and learn this process. That was a bonehead move on my part.