To do the dDo or not do the dDo?

Chicken Dip

Hey guys, so, as the title says, is dDo advisable for someone who is trying to get into those large gaming companies? I always heard the phrase "It doesn't matter how its done but as long as it gets done" which i agree, but also, what would a professional that has been working many years say? is it best to learn the dDo or just keep it hand made?

MikeF

i dont see any reason why it cant be used in a professional pipeline, but thats not to say that it should be the only tool in your repertoire. I regularily use it for a base texture, but that only gets me about 25% of the way there, the rest is done traditionally.

You can always tell when someone does a quick pass and calls it done using DDO, so if you know how to push past that starting point then its a fantastic tool.

EarthQuake

Tools are tools, dDo is a great way to speed up the process of texture creation, but you need to realize its simply a tool to help you do your work, not a "make art" button. If you just load up dDo, load some presets and call it a day, no that's not really going to fly in a production environment(aside from very small/unimportant props etc). If you use it as just another tool in your workflow to automate time consuming tasks like creating effects from various masks, managing d/s/n/g gloss layers etc, its very powerful and there is no reason why you wouldn't want to use it in production.

passerby

it's a fine tool, can really speedup the workflow, just don't use the defaults, make your own detail presets for it, and customize the shit out of it, than it really just becomes a tool to batch a lot of assets through the texturing process using presets you made when working on your first prop.

Bek

Exactly—dDo speeds setting up base values and tweaking (and the export dialogue for dDo is excellent); it is a great time saver. It is annoying to see people say "stop using dDo" rather than explaining that automation will only get you so far.

Personally I don't use the dDo presets at all; just to set up my .psd quickly and block in material definition. Beats setting up d/s/g for every material by hand (and then only being able to tweak one material per channel at a time).

So you certainly don't need dDo but if you think the time saved is worth the cost—go for it. They're updating it at some point to support pbr workflows too.

BARDLER

I use it to set my photoshop document and base materials really quickly for me. I also use it as a rapid visualization tool a little bit so I can play with some presets to get some ideas on different parts of my texture. Like EQ said though, its important to use the tool, and not just use it as a lazy crutch.

Stromberg90

I have used it to texture from start to finish, as others say you have to adapt it to your projects, make it work for you not the other way around.
Also I used it to quickly make dirt and wear at times then I use what dDo generates in my original document, masking out things I don't like and so on.

I am not against professionals using it, but I think beginners and hobbyists should be more careful with it, until the have a good grasp on texturing without such tools.

praetus

I've been using it at my job since September I think and as of yesterday we got the rest of the art team using it. I think it is really powerful and cuts down on the creation time of textures. We're planning on making our own presets that we can run and then further tweak on a per model basis. Once the templates are made it's great because we can keep a texture consistency regardless on who creates it.

The issue with me is that dDo creates texture detail and cranks it to 11. For it to really be of use you need to get into it and edit layers, values and masks yourself sometimes. The key for us is to make the final product look as if it were auto generated. Still it cuts down 50% of the lifting and initial setup for us and being able to preview the textures through the viewer is awesome.