Texture workflow - The ultimate?

cookedpeanut

Hi again,

I recently made a thread asking about advice on Modo (http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=108023&highlight=modo) as a comparison to various alternatives.

I recently suffered a spinal injury and so I've been bed bound for nearly a week, so I'm using the time to concentrate on learning more about modelling and texturing workflows.

I initially used Blender, however as the thread above mentions, I'm now moving onto Modo to advance into a more commercial workflow.

I'm now on my second question - Texturing.

It's a big subject, I know... One can texture in Photoshop or do all the candy right onto the model in programs like 3DCoat. What's the best though?

What do you find to be your best workflow, what programs do you use and what sort of order do you organize the texturing in? Is texturing in programs like 3DCoat better than the likes of Photoshop? Yes, no?

I love hard-surface modelling, any tips for texturing the likes of metal and plastic?
Would I be cheeky by asking for any links to brushes or textures you may use for such texturing? Being new to texturing (I've always been the modelling kind) I would love to build up an archive of useful resources...

Would love to hear from you guys, hopefully this thread will help other people too, sorry if it's one of those cliche questions - honestly though, absolutely any advice, tips tricks of any kind would be appreciated.

Peanut

repete

Hello Peanut

Sorry to hear about your injury, get well soon !!!

I absolutely love modo and have been using it for about 4 months now. There are loads of materials and textures that come with it and here are plenty more:

http://forums.luxology.com/topic.aspx?f=3&t=16238

Should be more than enough to get you started

As for Hard Surface UV Tips here is a nice tutorial:
http://www.luxology.com/tv/training/view.aspx?id=264

and hard-surface modelling:
http://cgcookie.com/modo/2010/02/25/hard-surface-modeling-tips-and-tricks/

http://www.3dm3.com/forum/articles.php?action=viewarticle&artid=128

Good luck

Pete

Gestalt

cookedpeanut wrote: »

I initially used Blender, however as the thread above mentions, I'm now moving onto Modo to advance into a more commercial workflow.

I don't think too many places really use Modo either. The basic workflow, the methodology, is pretty much the same in all of the modeling apps but with different interfaces. The export options are pretty standard, so you can use your work from one app wherever. If the place you're working for is cool with it, and you aren't using special plugins then using Modo is no more 'commercial' than using Blender. Trust me when I say Blender is not to be written off just because it's open source, you're not missing out on much.

Anyway besides that I really like tiled texture workflows. You can do a high quality version of this by actually making (modeling/sculpting) a single tile of the material using something like zbrush. For example you might lay out a bunch of bricks and make them tile, then bake that to a plane as a full tileable texture.

Rather than paint a piece fully using many high-res textures, one method would be to use tileable textures, maybe create a texture atlas that has multiple tileable textures, one for each of the materials. You can use masking, transformations and layering to add variation, vert paint to mask which material goes where on the mesh; it's a workflow that you can find a lot of information on if you're interested. For many things you can even reduce your diffuse textures to grayscale images and apply the color later in the engine, possibly through gradient mapping, which can add a lot of versatility as well as speed and lower resources. All things to look up if you're interested.

For high-poly sculpted models if you're painting by hand, you can bake the high-poly vert color (polypaint) to a texture in xnormal. You can use that as a starting point to further detail in photoshop. 3dcoat has some nice paint tools, although it used to be pretty memory demanding (that may have changed), so if you would like to take a model and paint directly to texture, that could work. You can also do some normal painting that way but I'd be careful because there used to be seam issues. NDO2 is another popular approach for normals if you want to make something quick, that'd be something to look into.

tristamus

3DCoat has since becoming absolutely fantastic for painting maps directly onto your models. Mudbox as well! The abilities of these two apps circumvents most photoshop work for me, besides using filters, layer adjustments, making selection masks etc, ofcourse. And don't get me wrong, I love photoshop - but when you can immediately see your maps that you're painting on your model, that really does it for me!

I will still make all my layers and folders in PS while I'm painting, and organize and work with mudbox or 3dcoat with PS open at the same time, experimenting and changing things constantly.

Bek

Modo actually has inbuilt painting features, so you might find want to check out those as well as 3d coat and the like, if it simplifies your workflow and saves you money then that's a win-win.

warxsnake

After a lot of research, 3dcoat is by far my favorite 3d painting program for game assets.

Farfarer

Bek wrote: »

Modo actually has inbuilt painting features, so you might find want to check out those as well as 3d coat and the like, if it simplifies your workflow and saves you money then that's a win-win.

Modo's painting isn't all that great. At most, I use it to rough out shapes on a model (especially painting over UV seams) so that I can save that out and pull it up in Photoshop to use as a guide.

Bek

Ah that's a shame, I've only glanced at it myself in 501.

Gheromo

I personally found Mari to be much more flexible to what you can achieve in it. Dont get me wrong I love 3D coat too, its very cheap and easy to learn, plus has other nice feeatures. Cant say anything good about mudbox, really dont like all the tools it has as well as offsetted uv's out of 0 to 1 space that you cant see updating realtime.