dDo and nD02

c01t

Greetings Polycount,

I am currently a 2nd year game design student studying environment design, I recently picked up nDo2 and dDo after seeing the great reviews it has gotten. I have been playing with it for a couple days now and I have to say that it is fantastic! I love it, I was able to make a whole SciFi corridor in a few hours and it was relatively easy to learn. My only question is, is it wrong to use it? I see lots of artist saying not to use dDo and I was wondering what the reason for that was. I am able to create a similar texture it just takes way more time and using dDo seems to save loads of time and it still looks fantastic. Anyways just wondering why people say not to use it.

Ninjas

I think it depends on if you are shooting for the best possible portfolio piece or if you are just trying to make something for a game. I personally think dDo is great and use it all the time.

Bek

There are certainly divided opinions on dDo. I usually argue in its favour; I think it is a good tool that saves you time (Personally I don't use the dDo material presets; I just use it to quickly get an organised .psd and base d/s/g values, so I can iterate through various looks without wasting time) and can teach you how d/s/g work together to define a material.

The argument against dDo (that I'm aware of anyway) is that it becomes a crutch and stops people developing their texturing skills, as they just add detail presets, play with a slider or two and call it done. Once you become aware of this pitfall though it should be easy to avoid it.

dDo helped me understand how d/s/g maps come together for different materials which is why I don't think newbies should be discouraged from using it (some people think they should avoid it until they know the non-dDo workflow / general texturing ideas); as long as its not treated as a one-click generate art button then you're fine.

Probably stay away from the 'make texture presentation' thing though; it looks cool but obscures too much of each map imo (if you're looking for crits anyway)

aajohnny

I always stand by "As long as it looks good...who cares?". I personally think that there is no right and wrong, use what is best for you and gives you good results. I personally use nDo2 and dDo...BUT there is a con to using both nDo2 and dDo all of the time - your other skills like hand-painting, hard-surface modelling, etc ,starts to get rusty. Just make sure you keep your skills up to par!

NegevPro

I haven't personally used nDo2 but I use dDo all the time. It's an awesome tool but as others have said it can hurt your skills if you aren't careful. Personally I usually just use dDo to set up the different files/folders/etc. and to automatically export my D/N/S when I want to see the update textures in a realtime environment.

I think it's fine as long as you don't come to rely on it. If you already know the texture workflow without using dDo then go ahead and save your time by using it. I don't work at any studio so maybe somebody else can comment on it, but I'd imagine a lot of studios use this tool to help save time so it might actually be better for you to understand how to use it so you can incorporate it into your workflow.

Bruno Afonseca

To get good results out of dDo you need to properly understand material properties anyway. It's a good substitute for repetitive work but not for an artistic eye. It's just a tool (a very awesome one)

Equanim

NegevPro wrote: »

I think it's fine as long as you don't come to rely on it.

That hits the nail on the head imo. They save you a TON of time, which is fantastic when you have a deadline, but sometimes you don't have all your tools at your disposal (budget, major software updates, style constraints, etc.) so you should know how to get by without them, albeit with a few handicaps.

praetus

We finally made the purchase of nDo2 and dDo and work and it has been a huge boon. I still use high poly bakes for some normal maps, but for small details like bolts and rivets I can create based on shape data in photoshop. It gives me more control over how I want my normals to look and I don't have to worry about details becoming skewed because I didn't drop in an extra vert somewhere. The use of dDo into my workflow has also helped immensely. I would spend days on textures that I can now create in a few hours with working spec, gloss, and normal details.

I think it is important to know how to do these manually, as it is a skill and not every studio you work at will have access to these programs. that being said, once you know how to create these, the ability to crank things out faster to meet deadlines is awesome. I would say the biggest key for me was learning how to manipulate the masks across dDo and use multiple subtle layers so that the textures are not instantly recognizable as dDo creations.

c01t

Thanks for the replies! I guess I will keep doing both!