What program for texturing?
Hello again people, I wanna make some textures for my sword now but I'm not sure at how to start and with what program to.
I've seen that lot's of people work with ZBrush that is where I created my high poly, I guess I could use it, but, I've seen lot's of people doing textures by drawing in photoshop and other 2D programs.
I don't fully understand the connection between painting something on ZBrush or Photoshop, can this be unified? Can I make use of the 2 procedures at the same time? Or are they always separated? Thanks!
I've seen that lot's of people work with ZBrush that is where I created my high poly, I guess I could use it, but, I've seen lot's of people doing textures by drawing in photoshop and other 2D programs.
I don't fully understand the connection between painting something on ZBrush or Photoshop, can this be unified? Can I make use of the 2 procedures at the same time? Or are they always separated? Thanks!
Replies
There are two ways you can use this. Method 1 is to paint on your highpoly, export your OBJ with polypaint and then bake the vertex colors onto your low poly via Xnormal. Then make edit and composite your AO + whatever other maps in Photoshop. I like this method the best but that is just me. If you want to make edits on the Polypaint it becomes a pain to re-bake the texture.
OR
You can import your low poly OBJ into Zbrush with UVs and paint directly on your low poly. Then inside of Zbrush you can convert your Polypaint to a texture, export to Photoshop and finish it up in there. This is a pretty flexible way because you can always go back to Zbrush and make edits and re-export the texture but I don't typically work like this.
Generally most people never take their texture to 100% finished inside of Zbrush (at least in a production setting) because it lacks layer controls and this makes edits later on a pain in the ass. So typically it's just the base diffuse is painted in Zbrush and the rest is added in PS on layers.
There is also ZappLink. This will import your Zbrush canvas into Photoshop so you can paint on it using Photoshop tools. Then it will re-import that into Zbrush and project it onto the mesh similar to how Spotlight works. You can use this with either method mentioned above.
Did that answer your question or just make more?
It's got a couple of big limitations compared to some of its competitors - lack of layers, a need to subdivide a model for painting (which either distorts UVs or needs subdivided without smoothing turned on) and aninability to work in 3d on a texture sheet without dropping and sending a projection to photoshop.
Why this is remains a mystery to me given how good the modelling is but... hey.
For 3d texturing on a low poly object the main packages people seem to use are:
1) Mudbox: On a plus side its very easy to learn, has a nice feel to the brushes and links directly to other autodesk products. A major flaw when I last tested it was it's more optimised for high poly painting. Painting on mirrored UVs and 'long' polygons that aren't square seemed to lead to frustrating bleeds or artifacts.
2) Mari: Great for what it does but by all accounts more optimized for high end film texturing than games. I've not tried Mari 2 so others might be able to give you a more accurate description.
3) 3dcoat: For my money easily the best low poly painted available. The brushes work fine, it both links layers and projections with photoshop (or another painting app) and is relatively cheap (certainly cheaper than mari and mudbox). Pretty easy to get to grips with if you just want to paint on an object and has a demo. Well worth a look.
There are other packages which do similar things ranging from blender's painting tools to those in Modo or 3dsmax.
I'm a long-time photoshop user and I love it, I will try painting over the UVs I did and see what I came out with.
I have seen 3dcoat on Steam at a very decent price, I'll check it out, some demo or stuff and then think about it.
Well people, thanks again! I will see to this matter as fast as I can!
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Obviously you can get great results out of blender but is it missing anything? Lazymouse? Symmetry? Projection to PS etc?