Textures and their purpose

4evra

So,i'm about to throw myself into the texturing part of 3dmax.I've tried to grasp it alone,but ithere's too much of it spreaded out to grasp in one piece.
Anyway,i've got some tutorials from here,so it shouldn't be a problem for a 2,3 week time span.

However,tutorials won't give me some simple answers on some of my questions,so i would like to ask the community to help me grasp the textures term in general,since i don't want to know how to texture and stuff without knowing what it really is and so on.

So:
Whats the main reason behing using textures instead of 3dmax materials?
As far as i can see now,only good thing is that u can easily make custom materials,which have a lot colors and shapes in them?
In fact,textures are material,Just a mannually drawed one,instead of material generated ones??Since they are added as maps to mat?

If one decides to use just a "regular" materials from max which he creates instead of using textures,is he's work in any way "degraded" in terms of reaching its full potencial?

Or is a texture just a regular material like all others,with difrence that its created outside of 3dmax?

Could it be that the main reason behind texturing is because u don't have to have a n-number of different material for some complex object,but only 1(texture)?

These are all simple questions,however,i have to ask since i can only assume something here,can't really know for sure,so i thought it's better to check it out than tap in dark

throttlekitty

Materials like this will only be good in the 3d app they were created in. Games (typically) use simple ambient + diffuse + specular flat colored materials, and don't generally support procedural nodes. A procedural texture to handle all the needs for coloring and shading an object would become very process-intensive when initially loaded.

However, there's nothing stopping you from creating complex materials, and baking them out to textures for game use.

Ace-Angel

-Textures are what help you define patterns, details, etc in an artist understandable way and easy to transfer between apps, it's the only way an artist will be able to look at the work and understand it without programming know-how.

-Materials are procedural most of the time and no, you cannot have as many shapes, patterns in them, you're limited by what the program offers unless you plan to write your own proc. shader yourself for say something like skin on the macro level, and in a traditional texture you're limited to your pixel size, so there is ups and downs for both.

-Materials and Texures are two different things in most cases, Texture is the 2D color-paint information, materials is the definition of how it's represented on the model.

-The potential is not degraded because it depends on what you're doing, imagine drinking water through a straw or a cup, one is slow the other is fast, they both give you water, both of them are giving the end result, question is, do you want to drink water? However, it also depends on your job and the limitations of the application you're using, if you're using a coffee machine, and your boss wants orange juice, giving him tea will not the best idea.

-Most materials in games cannot process or create procedural materials unless you create them from scratch and use a texture to do all the kludge work, and even then it will be heavy. You see that proc. noise shader in Max? Stuff like that for real-time shaders is a no go, the instruction count alone in real-time is enough to kill most engines, you're gonna have to be real savvy.

-More materials/shaders = more draws/calls, meaning more process power required. If you have a gun, and the handle is rubber like material while the rest is metal, ask yourself, is asking extra render-time from your app worth it, or can you fake the 'rubber material' by adjusting your specular a little and maybe adding a cubemap to your metal instead with a mask?

4evra

Well that certanly shed some light on the textures part for me.Thanks guys

sprunghunt

It's totally possible to use simple noise in a game. It does require some programming as the noise from max/maya isn't setup to run in realtime.

http://devmag.org.za/2009/04/25/perlin-noise/

UDK used to have an option to overlay terrain with a simple noise to make it look more varied.

there is specifically a command in HLSL for generating seed values for perlin noise:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb509629(v=vs.85).aspx

but it's not designed to let you regenerate the noise on the fly.

Mark Dygert

Let me see if I understand the question, you are asking 'what is the difference between materials that use image maps and materials that use procedural materials'?

Image maps give you more artistic control and often require less technical wrangling to get what you want. They also have predictable technical budgets where procedural materials can easily get very complex and mathematically heavy. The more control you want over a procedural material the more complex it gets.

So with procedural materials you have to balance design, art and technical, your boss might want a rainbow behind a graphic in a billboard ad, but to do that procedurally it will cost more technical capital to get it done. With an image map, it won't be adding extra instructions or complexity it will just change the color of the pixels that already existed and it is artistically easier to pull off than trying to procedurally add a rainbow behind something.

Procedural materials are often random and 'you get what you get and you don't get upset'. You also don't ask it to do specific things like place scratches or dents in very specific places, again you can start to define instructions to constrain certain aspects of the procedural material but it adds complexity.

That's not to say they don't work or aren't helpful in helping to generate image maps because they can save a lot of time. But mostly its the technical wild card and artistic limitations that keep them very limited in games.