I guess this is the right place to post this. I was confused by the fact that World Machine doesn't create a mixture of rocks and snow in the color map output even though the forms are there. So, I figured out a simple way to create masks for snowy-rocky textures:
It's confusing to me because metals have no diffuse light, it's purely reflection color because the surface is so dense/hard. But these kinds of materials are usually very soft.
If anyone has any ideas on how this should be done in a physically based rendering setup plz post away!
I think i'd go with this:
A little bit of gold colored spec
"noise" normal map for the "fabric"
and a very dimmed cubemap this is what gives the metallic look you need to find the right value with it so it's not too metallic either.
Fairly dark golden/brownish diffuse
It's confusing to me because metals have no diffuse light, it's purely reflection color because the surface is so dense/hard. But these kinds of materials are usually very soft.
If anyone has any ideas on how this should be done in a physically based rendering setup plz post away!
It actually isn't to do with the density of the particles in the surface really. Anyway, you'd probably want a gold/browny kinda tinted specular component, and tbh I'd probably ditch the noise or keep it VERY low contrast, as that is really high frequency and it's going to look nasty if you aren't super close to it. Mips could handle it I guess but still pays to be careful.
Highly tiled normalmap for the cloth fabric is another (and more physically correct) route to take.
edit: and make sure you have fresnel. Everything has fresnel.
Is there a way to combine all these maps so that when I import to Uni they apply correctly? I made the diffuse maps in parts and when I export (.obj) and then open the file in Maya, all the maps are applied correctly but not in Uni. How can I fix this? Do I have to make one map for the whole?
If you want to create one large texture out of these seperate maps you could to the following:
1. Create one new UV Sheet which includes all the geometry of your ship.
2. Render down the Texture into the new UV Sheet (Bake it)
To expand on this a bit, you would add a second UV modifier set on channel 2 and unwrap the entire model on one sheet.
When you have done this, you need to create an omni light somewhere in the scene and turn it off, then set the environment color to pure white. This ensures that the baked texture is not affected by light.
When you render a complete map via render to texture, you must select UV channel 2 as the target UV channel.
EDIT: Looks like you're using Maya. I'm not sure what the process would be for Maya.
I don't have a limitation on triangles, so I am wondering if it would (or wouldn't) be a good idea to actually make it transparant, and have actual geo in there for the bullets. (and if so, if anyone has done something similar for this, any tips to get that sort of "frosted" plastic look- see bottom image).
and if not, how best to fake this?
But then I am wondering on the animation part for the spring when the bullets get depleted, what would a good approach be to do that spring from its compressed state to this:
I think you ought to be careful doing transparency on an object like that, at least if you plan on the model being optimized. I don't know all the specifics behind it but having transparency means your graphics card will have to make an extra draw call to "see whats behind". In the quest for optimized game assets I've always been told extra geo is always preferable to extra draw calls, because it force the hardware to make an extra round of computations.
There's probably someone out there who could explain that better than me, but if you were to have transparency, try making it so it only has to compute one layer beneath and avoid leakage.
Yes it has to do an extra call but its not that horrid a deal. Any transparent item will need to be sorted and drawn over the other things in the scene, and any material change will need another draw call, etc etc.
There are technical tradeoffs between how well your engine batches geometry, how your shaders are set up, and all sorts of other factors, but in general I'd say 2 things: 1 don't stress about it. 2 don't go crazy with any individual aspect of your artwork.
There are several ways to make your magazine.
1: just model the thing out. Have the plastic be partly transparent with a very low gloss and a subtly bumpy normal map.
Animation options for spring: 1: morph target 2: bone movement. have an anchor bone at the base and a movement one at the top. Translate along path as needed.
Options for bullets: 1: a bone for each bullet. Move it somewhere inside the gun at the end of each shot. 2: use the transparency of your material to be linked to some offset from the outer bound of the weapon representing where the "chamber" is. You can simply move the whole bullet stack up and they'll disappear once they would be loaded.
Option 2 for the thing.
Do it all in the material. This would work a lot better if it wasn't a 100% transparent mag. But you can have the bullets and spring be on one part of the texture, and have that piece scroll up as shots are fired, giving the impression of actual bullets in the mag moving.
All depends on tech, budgets, and desired end result really.
Thanks for the input/help, especially with the animation part since I have almost no experience with that.
Seems like I'll just be testing out some different approaches, since there isn't really a right or prefferred way to do it.
Actually it's not for a game, I use Maya+VRay, but the principles and the bitmaps are the same. If someone can help me with this I will be very grateful.
Texturing wood like that is actually surprisingly easy. Here's the steps I'd go through:
1. Find a photo or create the part of the texture witt the curved wooden fibers.
2. Do a single planar projection with the whole model from one of the sides of the cube.
3. Bake this texture down on to the regular UVs.
4. Add some extra photo-overlays to create some additional detail on the parts where the texture stretched.
Yup, Nosslak's solution works well, you just have to go over the straight grain lines to add a bit more edge width variation. I've seen people do this for wood gun stocks.
How small a texture are we talking about? Make it mainly dark gray with subtle and make the specular highlight subtle and broad in size. Use the available texture space to add different shades of gray for variation, maybe a bit of brown for dust.
Hey guys...quick question I'm hoping someone may be able to answer. It looks like Maya's FBX plug-in is failing to export smoothing groups for use in UDK. I thought it was a 3D Coat setting I was missing, but If I just create a sphere in maya, smooth all the normals and export (and yeah I make sure all the right boxes are ticked), the mesh comes in looking wacked out. Dark splotchy patches and strange highlights that don't follow the meshes topology. I have been dealing with this and looking for answers in multiple forums, including Epic. I see that many folks have had issues with FBX and smoothing groups, but there is no clear path to an answer. My plug-in just doesn't seem to be working. Anyone else?
In all fairness, the guys posted in like 4 different threads (starting with his own in the proper sub forum). Patiently waited for answers. Still having trouble it seems.
I've always been kind of curious as to what the best way of creating glass bottles would be, or glass in general. Especially when you can get up close and really examine it. Would it be worth it to add an extra layer of geo beneath the outside to give the illusion of thickness?
I'm not sure if anyone is looking at this thread anymore, but I had a question. How would you go about creating a stone floor material like this?
So far I've been trying to use crazybump on the photograph and a custom heightmap to do deeper cracks. Not getting a convincing result though. Think the problem is I'm trying to keep it relatively flat, like the floor is in real life. Is it even going to be possible to get a convincing result? How would you guys do it? Sculpting? Some photoshop wizardry? Thanks!
One thing that can help is to run your photo through various settings in the black and white filter in photoshop. This will isolate different colors and let you create different height maps. You can create a few then blend them together in various ways to have more control over your photo->Normal map conversion
Well, you're plugging a texture of a relatively flat floor, no wonder that's what Crazybump is spitting out. You could try a couple of different things before sculpting anything such as trying a different texture (duh) or trying nDo2 (much better results than Crazybump, IMHO). Or you could try actually sculpting it, here is some info on the subject:
Just curious if anyone has some good methods on creating this surface material? I DID see Racer had mentioned it in one of his tutorials, but never actually went through the process of creating it. In particular I'm trying to achieve the material sample on the far right of Racer's 'Theory II'.
I want it to be more then a lazy noise modifier and overlays
I suppose I'm really just looking for any other techniques. I should withdraw my comment about using noise and such, as I have seen this technique work great and it has even worked for myself in the past.
More or less, I'm just looking to know if there are texture methods to push a broader texture pattern for a polymer surface type. As you say, noise could work, with some good overlaying and etc. - but the pattern itself does not satisfy what I'm going for.
I suppose it may just take playing around a lot with PS, but Racer's comments on noise in his tutorial had me curious about other methods
Whats worked for me (and it pretty much what that racer tut gets at) is to make a pattern of the detail sourced from a photo. It looks more natural than doing it in PS.
Then it's just a matter of setting base values and proper blending modes on the detail in the spec and gloss (overlay or lighten usually works best on these, imo). Depending on your shader you may have to invert the noise layer in the gloss map. Hell, try it anyway, you may like the results.
I'm trying to accomplish this glossy (varnished) wood material in 3ds Max 2014, and is I chose to incorporate the nails in the texture (I now regret this however, but I was a complete beginner when I made that decision). This means I need to have different values for these two types of areas. It worked well as a Standard material (Wood: medium spec level, high glossiness; Nails: higher spec level, low glossiness), but when I switched to vraymtl (the sort of standard V-ray material) I just don't get how to accomplish it! It doesn't seem like the darkness of the wood part makes a difference in the "HGlossiness" ("highlight glossiness"/"hilight glossiness") slot, however adjusting the amount/strength parameter does!
The question, which is also at about 5:20-5:40 in the video, is why making the wood part darker in the HGlossiness map doesn't affect the HGlossiness value, as adjusting the strength/amount value of the slot does?
I've been googling and playing around with this for hours, I just don't get it! Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I've read the V-Ray documentation and still can't make sense of this.
Hey all. Need some help. I'm trying to get the textures on my Iron Man the way I want, but struggling.
In Iron Man 2 the textures at one point are all dusty, and I really like the look. However when I render out my stuff the dusty parts just looks like non-reflective areas of the highly reflective gold alloy. Any ideas on how I can make this look like dust and not just weird spots? I'm thinking it's the HDRI messing it up, but they probably used that in the movie as well so there's gotta be a way.
Cropped out the head on my render to illustrate my point. The silvery spots are supposed to look like dust.
Hi I've been lurking this forum for a while but had no reason to post until now. I'm practicing my texturing but have no clue how to even approach this rough/scratched milled metal.
Making some subtle stubble. Not sure if this is the most effective way of doing so but it sure was a quick way. If anyone has any tips to make it look better, let me know
^ In 3ds max I thought it may be a good idea to start off with just making some small cylinders, copying a few over then with local transformations, rotated them. Rinse and repeat till it filled the square. The base of the normal map.
So after baking I got this.
There are errors here and there but it doesn't matter so much as the size will be reduced when I overlay it on the pre-existing normal map for the head and those little hiccups will not be noticeable as far as i can tell. I used ndo2 to combine the two normal maps together and just erased parts that were unnecessary. That's about it.
That's actually cool, but wouldn't it have been easier to use one the many scripts on ScriptSpot to do all the randomization on the plane instead of manually (unless you mean something else)?
Or maybe use a cheap fur-xyz solution for the purpose of just baking maps, that would be great too.
Also, how did you overlay them? As in tile in PS and overlay on the final map OR do you mean a material solution with masking, etc?
That's actually cool, but wouldn't it have been easier to use one the many scripts on ScriptSpot to do all the randomization on the plane instead of manually (unless you mean something else)?
Or maybe use a cheap fur-xyz solution for the purpose of just baking maps, that would be great too.
Also, how did you overlay them? As in tile in PS and overlay on the final map OR do you mean a material solution with masking, etc?
Perhaps but honestly this process took hardly any time whatsoever. I used ndo2's overlay normal map feature on the final map.
Hey guys! Could I get some feedback on my current model texture? I'm graduating soon and I really want this to be the best I can be, would love some criticism.
If this is more appropriate for the pimpage thread I'll remove it and such.
surfur-
looking realy good so far.
I dont know if agree with some of your tears on the leather. You seem to have the under leather being stressed and torn but the straps that are above these area far less stress.
also maybe some dirt or drip marks under the bolts
I'm curious as to any methods you guys emply in order to get rid of seams in wood caused by UVs. Maybe some sort of baking the diffuse from planes might work? Could someone point me in the right direction? Also could I have some general tips for getting nice looking wood period?
You can project the wood textures on the model in 3d using something like Zbrush's Polypaint or 3d coat. Something that paints to the UV's (3d coat) rather than the highpoly's vertices (Zbrush) is preferable since then you don't have to make sure your high has even polygon distribution and you don't have to bake the texture from the high to low—but it depends what you have access to. I haven't used 3d coat yet myself but it probably has a lot more advantages than that over zbrush. Substance painter is something to keep an eye on though.
Something that paints to the UV's (3d coat) rather than the highpoly's vertices (Zbrush) is preferable since then you don't have to make sure your high has even polygon distribution and you don't have to bake the texture from the high to low—but it depends what you have access to.
(When projection painting for small fixes like this, zbrush can use UVs instead of relying on vertex colors and geometry resolution)
Replies
[ame="
metallic gold cord/rope
and metallic gold coatings.
It's confusing to me because metals have no diffuse light, it's purely reflection color because the surface is so dense/hard. But these kinds of materials are usually very soft.
If anyone has any ideas on how this should be done in a physically based rendering setup plz post away!
A little bit of gold colored spec
"noise" normal map for the "fabric"
and a very dimmed cubemap this is what gives the metallic look
Fairly dark golden/brownish diffuse
It actually isn't to do with the density of the particles in the surface really. Anyway, you'd probably want a gold/browny kinda tinted specular component, and tbh I'd probably ditch the noise or keep it VERY low contrast, as that is really high frequency and it's going to look nasty if you aren't super close to it. Mips could handle it I guess but still pays to be careful.
Highly tiled normalmap for the cloth fabric is another (and more physically correct) route to take.
edit: and make sure you have fresnel. Everything has fresnel.
1. Create one new UV Sheet which includes all the geometry of your ship.
2. Render down the Texture into the new UV Sheet (Bake it)
When you have done this, you need to create an omni light somewhere in the scene and turn it off, then set the environment color to pure white. This ensures that the baked texture is not affected by light.
When you render a complete map via render to texture, you must select UV channel 2 as the target UV channel.
EDIT: Looks like you're using Maya. I'm not sure what the process would be for Maya.
I don't have a limitation on triangles, so I am wondering if it would (or wouldn't) be a good idea to actually make it transparant, and have actual geo in there for the bullets. (and if so, if anyone has done something similar for this, any tips to get that sort of "frosted" plastic look- see bottom image).
and if not, how best to fake this?
But then I am wondering on the animation part for the spring when the bullets get depleted, what would a good approach be to do that spring from its compressed state to this:
I think you ought to be careful doing transparency on an object like that, at least if you plan on the model being optimized. I don't know all the specifics behind it but having transparency means your graphics card will have to make an extra draw call to "see whats behind". In the quest for optimized game assets I've always been told extra geo is always preferable to extra draw calls, because it force the hardware to make an extra round of computations.
There's probably someone out there who could explain that better than me, but if you were to have transparency, try making it so it only has to compute one layer beneath and avoid leakage.
There are technical tradeoffs between how well your engine batches geometry, how your shaders are set up, and all sorts of other factors, but in general I'd say 2 things: 1 don't stress about it. 2 don't go crazy with any individual aspect of your artwork.
There are several ways to make your magazine.
1: just model the thing out. Have the plastic be partly transparent with a very low gloss and a subtly bumpy normal map.
Animation options for spring: 1: morph target 2: bone movement. have an anchor bone at the base and a movement one at the top. Translate along path as needed.
Options for bullets: 1: a bone for each bullet. Move it somewhere inside the gun at the end of each shot. 2: use the transparency of your material to be linked to some offset from the outer bound of the weapon representing where the "chamber" is. You can simply move the whole bullet stack up and they'll disappear once they would be loaded.
Option 2 for the thing.
Do it all in the material. This would work a lot better if it wasn't a 100% transparent mag. But you can have the bullets and spring be on one part of the texture, and have that piece scroll up as shots are fired, giving the impression of actual bullets in the mag moving.
All depends on tech, budgets, and desired end result really.
Seems like I'll just be testing out some different approaches, since there isn't really a right or prefferred way to do it.
What I'm trying (and failing) to do is this:
Actually it's not for a game, I use Maya+VRay, but the principles and the bitmaps are the same. If someone can help me with this I will be very grateful.
Thanks in advance.
1. Find a photo or create the part of the texture witt the curved wooden fibers.
2. Do a single planar projection with the whole model from one of the sides of the cube.
3. Bake this texture down on to the regular UVs.
4. Add some extra photo-overlays to create some additional detail on the parts where the texture stretched.
Good luck!
thx:)
I remember seeing a note in UDK doc about using fbx 2012. (Im sure you tried all that crap by now, but just in case.)
HAHA
Hope you figure it out soon buddy
So far I've been trying to use crazybump on the photograph and a custom heightmap to do deeper cracks. Not getting a convincing result though. Think the problem is I'm trying to keep it relatively flat, like the floor is in real life. Is it even going to be possible to get a convincing result? How would you guys do it? Sculpting? Some photoshop wizardry? Thanks!
This is what I have so far (Awful):
http://eat3d.com/blog/eat-3d/new-free-video-creating-tileable-textures-zbrush
http://eat3d.com/blog/metalliandy/uncharted-2-texture-worlflow-zbrush
[ame="
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=68634
Just curious if anyone has some good methods on creating this surface material? I DID see Racer had mentioned it in one of his tutorials, but never actually went through the process of creating it. In particular I'm trying to achieve the material sample on the far right of Racer's 'Theory II'.
I want it to be more then a lazy noise modifier and overlays
Any ideas? Thanks for your time!
I suppose I'm really just looking for any other techniques. I should withdraw my comment about using noise and such, as I have seen this technique work great and it has even worked for myself in the past.
More or less, I'm just looking to know if there are texture methods to push a broader texture pattern for a polymer surface type. As you say, noise could work, with some good overlaying and etc. - but the pattern itself does not satisfy what I'm going for.
I suppose it may just take playing around a lot with PS, but Racer's comments on noise in his tutorial had me curious about other methods
Then it's just a matter of setting base values and proper blending modes on the detail in the spec and gloss (overlay or lighten usually works best on these, imo). Depending on your shader you may have to invert the noise layer in the gloss map. Hell, try it anyway, you may like the results.
I'm trying to accomplish this glossy (varnished) wood material in 3ds Max 2014, and is I chose to incorporate the nails in the texture (I now regret this however, but I was a complete beginner when I made that decision). This means I need to have different values for these two types of areas. It worked well as a Standard material (Wood: medium spec level, high glossiness; Nails: higher spec level, low glossiness), but when I switched to vraymtl (the sort of standard V-ray material) I just don't get how to accomplish it! It doesn't seem like the darkness of the wood part makes a difference in the "HGlossiness" ("highlight glossiness"/"hilight glossiness") slot, however adjusting the amount/strength parameter does!
The question, which is also at about 5:20-5:40 in the video, is why making the wood part darker in the HGlossiness map doesn't affect the HGlossiness value, as adjusting the strength/amount value of the slot does?
I explain it better in this video: [ame="
I've been googling and playing around with this for hours, I just don't get it! Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I've read the V-Ray documentation and still can't make sense of this.
Thanks in advance!
In Iron Man 2 the textures at one point are all dusty, and I really like the look. However when I render out my stuff the dusty parts just looks like non-reflective areas of the highly reflective gold alloy. Any ideas on how I can make this look like dust and not just weird spots? I'm thinking it's the HDRI messing it up, but they probably used that in the movie as well so there's gotta be a way.
Cropped out the head on my render to illustrate my point. The silvery spots are supposed to look like dust.
In the movie:
My diff and spec:
Making some subtle stubble. Not sure if this is the most effective way of doing so but it sure was a quick way. If anyone has any tips to make it look better, let me know
^ In 3ds max I thought it may be a good idea to start off with just making some small cylinders, copying a few over then with local transformations, rotated them. Rinse and repeat till it filled the square. The base of the normal map.
So after baking I got this.
There are errors here and there but it doesn't matter so much as the size will be reduced when I overlay it on the pre-existing normal map for the head and those little hiccups will not be noticeable as far as i can tell. I used ndo2 to combine the two normal maps together and just erased parts that were unnecessary. That's about it.
Or maybe use a cheap fur-xyz solution for the purpose of just baking maps, that would be great too.
Also, how did you overlay them? As in tile in PS and overlay on the final map OR do you mean a material solution with masking, etc?
Perhaps but honestly this process took hardly any time whatsoever. I used ndo2's overlay normal map feature on the final map.
[vv]77399216[/vv]
If this is more appropriate for the pimpage thread I'll remove it and such.
looking realy good so far.
I dont know if agree with some of your tears on the leather. You seem to have the under leather being stressed and torn but the straps that are above these area far less stress.
also maybe some dirt or drip marks under the bolts
This part just keeps looking wrong, if anyone need's the file to show the fix just ask for it.
Thanks, Alex
I'm curious as to any methods you guys emply in order to get rid of seams in wood caused by UVs. Maybe some sort of baking the diffuse from planes might work? Could someone point me in the right direction? Also could I have some general tips for getting nice looking wood period?