Is it "cheating" to use photographs for textures?
Hey guys, I know this is more of an opinionated thing that really doesn't have a right or wrong. I just want to get some feedback since I'm having a hard time getting my capstone project for my university in gear.
Ideally I want to do level design or 3d modeling. My texturing isn't progressing as well as I would like it to, though. I'm working on some wooden objects right now and I can get close facsimiles to wood, but nothing realistic. The only way I can avoid doing a stylized version is to use photo textures from places like CGTexutres and then build from that point. It also doesn't help that being red/green color blind slows me down a bit.
Some issues I do run across is that I have a lack of control when I use a photo. For instance, the grain of the wood I can't really do anything with in ZBrush since it's already on the texture. I have to build around the photo instead of building the texture layer by layer, which means a lot of CrazyBump (which is AWESOME, but lacks the finesse you can get when building the textures layer by layer). Again, those drawbacks are small compared to the fact that I actually have realistic looking wood.
The results are better when I'm using the photos, but I'm wondering if it is looked down on from an employment aspect if you are better using and manipulating photos than painting from scratch?
Ideally I want to do level design or 3d modeling. My texturing isn't progressing as well as I would like it to, though. I'm working on some wooden objects right now and I can get close facsimiles to wood, but nothing realistic. The only way I can avoid doing a stylized version is to use photo textures from places like CGTexutres and then build from that point. It also doesn't help that being red/green color blind slows me down a bit.
Some issues I do run across is that I have a lack of control when I use a photo. For instance, the grain of the wood I can't really do anything with in ZBrush since it's already on the texture. I have to build around the photo instead of building the texture layer by layer, which means a lot of CrazyBump (which is AWESOME, but lacks the finesse you can get when building the textures layer by layer). Again, those drawbacks are small compared to the fact that I actually have realistic looking wood.
The results are better when I'm using the photos, but I'm wondering if it is looked down on from an employment aspect if you are better using and manipulating photos than painting from scratch?
Replies
it's extremely commonplace and saves tons of time. only when the project calls for a specific art style or something should you be hand painting the majority.
From being in a position to hire, there's a couple of things I can say.
As great and accessible as CGtextures is, I am personally starting to recognise textures from it so mix it up a little and don't use them as is. I've personally spotted other competitors game textures being used in production on projects I've worked on and you can imagine how that went down. Generally you get better quality over hand drawn unless it's a particular style you're after. Even better if you use your own photographs. And photographs will help compensate for your red/green loss.
Also, don't think that employers will look just at the quality. Time and cost are as important, so production has to balance this in the traditional t,c and q triangle. A perfect hand drawn texture taking 3 days will be compared to a photo edit taking 1hour and unless there's cash to burn, this won't be tolerated in production. Be sure to detail how long texturing takes, unfortunatley something most portfolios lack.
Carry on with your honest self assessment and act on improving and I'm sure you wont go far wrong.
Before I use photo for texturing I usualy tweak it in photoshop for my needs. you can also blend photos and normal maps with what you bake form your hipoly model
you have to also remember that a lot of realistic feeling is comming from shader/material. bad specular/gloss can make metal look like concrete or wood like plastic
website like gametextures.com or cgtextures, and programs like Ndo2, crazybump exist because we use photos
try to adjust photos for your needs rather then copy/paste photo streight as a diffuse map
Thank you as well bacteria. I do manipulate the photos while working with them, not just using them as a straight diffuse, but I appreciate the feedback. I think the feeling I got from that was when I manipulate photos and get results I think look good in a short amount of time I feel almost like "that was way too easy" and try to figure out if I am missing something important, hah.
Anything goes really as long as you don't neglect art direction which is the most important part.
It is not cheating it's simply part of the 3D art work flow imo.
:poly121:
When you take photo as a source, you must process it to suit your needs. Sometimes I just like a pattern but not the color range, so I rip just the pattern and make my own colors/grunge. Sometimes the photo is over or underexposed, which means you need to know how to fix that or you get a pretty boring texture.
Alot of my textures come from this process, that and actually modeling the stuff out and baking it down and there is no cheating its all about the result
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90% of texture work I see around its pretty bad to be honest, yes thats my opinion.
I am talking about "photoreal" texuring (I do textures for film) I do not do handpaint stylized at work so that is not my expertise in that case I assume photos are not required as part of the process. Anyways I am surprised at how many people think that straight out photos from cgtextures are good enough with a bit of tweaking here and there, most cases they are not. A lot of pictures in cg textures are taken with bad lighting (...have strong shadows, lighting information, over the top noise...etc...etc) You always need to grade your source images before working. If you plan to do lets say rock, then first , before you even start downloading any texture or doing any texturing work. Spend at least half a day analyzing reference for the object you intend to do, how does it reflect? what is the fresnel value on that material, does it have composed materials, is it really rough? how much is the reflection eating our the color values... you need to decompose any object in a shading perspective. so yes that means shading is KEY to good texturing. You need to have at least some basic shading values before hand to know how will your maps react.
Once you have at least a base of that figured out, then start with modeling. Yes by modeling I mean, the first step I suggest to do in texturing is "finishing the modeling". Lets say you are provided displacement maps, but lets say those are only low frequency/ mid frequcncy detail (for rock for example) but they are missing some high frequency information, well then you will need to find out what kind of information you need in order to bring those details in texturing. Then in regards to the specifications of your pipeline you will decide whether to bring those details onto the bump , displace or normal map.
Once all the modeling is in place and the model reads nicely. Slap on pure black for color and start playing with reflection, glossiness and fresnel values in your shader.
Try those values with global ilumination to see how does your object with the bump/normal/displace reacts to light. Does it reads good?
Now please bare in mind that I am talking in regards to a film perspective, and I am not sure how flexible are shaders in a game engine, but I am assuming they still can give you realtime feedback for reflection and glossiness at least.
once thats done and the material "looks" like the material you are looking for only with a black color (I say pure black because at this point we are only interested in reading reflection / roughness (or glossiness which is the contrary...it depends on the shader engine) , fresnel information, so color is not useful at this point)
surface details such as bump/displacement DO affect your reflection and glosiness so you need to adjust your Reflection, glossiness and fresnel in regards to bump/disp ..etc
then as last tip, when you do your color map, somthing that helps me is decomposing things into "frequencies" say. Low frequency (subtle big detail that help breaking the surface for better lighting interation, something like a soft blck/white fractal with low roughness) then middle frequency, which is not sharp detail but as the name says mid size detail, and finally sharp detail, which will be high frequency. at any of those steps you can a apply a bunch of techniques but once again, try to grade your source images to remove highlights and shadows at least to a decent level before using them in your texturing process. Also if you are using many maps try putting them all together and grade them accodingly if they come from different cameras and lighting situations, their levels of luminosity are probably not the same, so if you grade all your maps to be in the same color space you'll have an easier time when you start texturing.
Finally "photos" are just part of textures, they are not "textures". Good textures are crafted taking a lot of those considerations I mentioned, and having tons of patience. there is also a lot of hand paint in photoreal texturing, even a lot of procedural but is always a mix of everything. I use mari to work and its a huge time saver to build up colored fractals or other type of procedural data that is a bit longuer to set up in photoshop...(not to mention a BUNCH of other things...), so if you havent try it I do recommend you try downloading the demo version.
I do apologize if I am not explaining a lot of stuff in detail, I might be sounding a bit confusing at some points... I just typed as things came to my head!! heh
Good luck and hope to see some work from you!
cheers.
Edit: for good textures sources I suggest you use: www.surfacemimic.com
or take your own photos if you can, and work at 16bit... if possible.
And I'd like to +1 the surface mimic stuff. there also working on putting together some reference images using a polarized lens and using other techniques to remove lighting/specular information from an image. keep an eye on that.
Feng Zhu recently did a video where he was painting over some photos and he suggested you lower the resolution on the photo to something really small and then blow it up again. This softens/blurs the photo and will make your painting blend in much more easily.
In a short amount of time you will have built up quite a library for texture work. Try to convert a few of them into tiled textures every day and you will have even more usable textures to work with. Toss in nDo2 (<3 Quixel) and you can convert normal, spec, and AO maps on the fly.
Doing this will not only give your own textures to work with that are 100% yours, but they can become an asset to any job or project you work on. You wont have to do what many artist do which is jump straight into google images or cgtextures.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=122359
In the thread Rogelio answers a lot of questions regarding textures. And some of them include where they use photos.
Looking at the thread you posted, I can recall many of the points I mentioned...
sorry if I sound picky, but I dont think thats overall good texture/shading work.
just look at the wood barks, strong baked shadows... almost pure black, bad res, tiled pattern (doesnt look natural) bad reflection...stuff all around looks ultra matte..
rocks look matte, no reflection highlights whatsoever.... the dirt looks too dark, no differece in frequencies... etc etc..
the "dirt" on the exterior of the boat... looks super strong almost like a splash of ink, and the mask they used doent have any nuances to make it a bit subtle... not to recal the scale of the detail...placement etc...
interior of the boat, the cracking paint texture ....looks like a slapped image from cg textures, cracking paint pattern is too big, its all around, no variation, no tonal variation, too much shadow...etc...
looking at it , looks like everything is too dark, grunge and dirt is too strong, not enough variation in tone/detail... not to mention resolution (although I undestand there might be constraints due to game engine's nature)
but even besides that...
note, this is my opinion, and I am not saying stuff to be negative, but I dont think thats an example to follow at least not if you aim for good "realism"...
@Dylan, thanks man. Yes surface mimic is really cool!
@Mister_s, thanks! no prob. Best advice I can give you is to look "real world" references, analyze them in detail. Dont base your work on other people's work, specially if you are starting, because some people say is good it might mislead you, because that person might not know him/herself what's actually "good"... so it creates a chain...and people praise stuff all around and do not notice stuff like I mentioned... or if they do, they let it pass.
google images is your best friend.
Also, when you do a material (metal, wood ...rock, etc), once again dont fall on specific techniques or plugins to achieve this or that effect... It might take a bit longer but you will be more satisfied and you will understand how materials are build in real life. I see many "recipes" for metal... wood etc...
that in the end from what I see is that all metal, wood looks the same...
man materials are soo different... (is it brass, iron. does it have a coating, does that coating affect glossiness? yes, how? at what point, does it affect fresnel? yes, how... then is it supposed to be "old" (grunge) , to what degree?? once again shading is a key part. In film is called look development, which is the development of shaders and shading networks that will be feed with textures.
To make stuff the most plausible. But I assume there's a dpt ment in game companies that might do somehting along those lines.
Knowing how to use stock textures to craft your own unique material is more important than 'notcieability'.
Time is more important than quality in many cases. If you can do both, then you are the bee's knees.
Now to the textures. Material mimicking is important I highly agree with that. But also stylization is an important aspect, Last of Us was not going for perfect realism. It was more realistic than Uncharted but still held a painterly look. With the new coming tech and engine advancments to come you will see engines using Physical shaders which will help for material precision. Most games now a days only had to deal with Specular... and as we all know specular does not actually happen in the real world. The effect is tiny reflections which in physical shaders are described as roughness, also different terms of highlights and falloffs etc. Which most games on our current gen do not even have. We have Phong and Blinn... that is it, this makes it hard to get precise material types... we have options for falloff but end up being expensive, If I really wanted to make liquid more realistic than falloff is a need without it looks like gummy mirrors, which this one looks like a gummy mirror.
Wood barks - Outsourced yep not the best but time is time. Hence not included in my texture sheets.
Rocks looking matte- Ill give you that one, but since we do not have awesome anti aliasing and a great handle on the spec it ended up making the background noisy from afar, I tried it did not look too good so it was reduced.
Dirt- Ok it is a bit strong, if I had more ability to add layer variations than I would have gone with more variations that would add interest. This was just the way to add interest at the time and it was a stylization I went for.
Cracking Paint- Guilty, funny thing is some people thought it was sculpted in Naughty Dog and actually liked it a lot. Plus this was one of the last textures I did and took me a short time of (10 mins) to replace a horrible outsourced one that was super low res. I tested it smaller to be more real but anti-aliasing would make for a noisy mess far away. Time being a factor in alot of decisions, And if it looks good at many angles being another with current tech.
all textures are 512x512. I remember the framestore days 4096 or 2048 or higher even!
Proper ways to make materials are here and this is the most accurate information and technical explanations coming up soon in games.
http://seblagarde.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/observe-rainy-world/
https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/gamedev/files/gdc12/GDC2012_Mastering_DirectX11_with_Unity.pdf
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/aniso_ref/aniso_ref.htm
These are great suggested reading of people in the game industry talking about the next advancements of our tech and yes it is still limited compared to VFX.
My wife works in vfx studio here in LA she has worked in movies like Avengers, Twilight, and other blockbusters. She was involved with many aspects including textures. I know the clear distinction between both I just choose games.
Three main reasons why the textures ended up shipping like that.
-Stylization
-Tech
-Time
My wife ends up working on one or two shots per movie or more. One shot being a couple frames of work. Meaning whatever is on screen is the only thing that needs textures/shaders. Passes help a lot also, if you were to turn the camera just a little bit to which ever way you would see no models no more shaders or such since those are not needed in the shot. In games we have to represent everything around us and time is a constraint.
Also realism does not = great
nor does bad stylization = great
but balance between color, tone, and composition does.
I am willing to bet the Last of Us did an OK job overall. right? I mean I can not walk without tripping over news about it anymore.
So that is pretty much my spill. I highly recommend those links, I have more I can supply some really great crytek ones all great reads.
The new tech coming up will be awesome for sure.
I do appreciate you giving me such a detail insight of your production process and constraints. I do agree that vfx texture & surfacing process is a very different animal than the one for video games. To be honest I only have production experience in film or high res advertising. So my thoughts about texturing/shading standards might not be efficient in a game environment perspective where you need to make the best compromise possible between quality and time.
I totally get your points and once again I appreciate your time going into that detail...
yeah well outsourcing texture work might be pretty hard to manage man...
about stylization... yes I guess thats were a big line is drawn from vfx and games... I initially did learned 3d for videogames... and enjoyed a lot the fact that in videogames there is a lot more of styles than in vfx (...I mean in general) reason why I keep coming to polycount as I still enjoy a lot videogame art. On the other hand one of the reasons I went to film was the limitations of current shading/lighting as well as all the technical limitations of game engines to achieve "proper realism".
But yes, I guess you can't have it all...not for the time being at least! but tech keeps getting damn closer.... those links you posted look pretty interesting, thanks for putting them. In the end yes its a balance between style and realism... and also time! !! yes
I do apologize if I came on a bit drastic on my thoughts, was nothing personal and do wrote kinda on the go, I do understand and appreciate you and your team's effort and besides all those nit and picks I pointed out the game as a whole looks pretty cool.
I really liked the frame of the two dudes and the girl close to the fireplace, everything hold together nicely, also all the interior environments in the building are pretty cool !
glad to meet you, and I am happy to know you implicate in such detail, cause thats what it takes to make kickass stuff, whatever tech or theme that might be!
Edit:
Also glad to know you and your wife are working in cg! thats nice.
hah yeah, these days I am texturing a bridge that is around 35 x 4k maps... (takes mari around 2 hrs...just to bake buffers and spit out those!...) and thats just color maps
cheers man.