Texturing workflow - software
polycounter lvl 11
Hi guys,
Im interested in hearing what other people are doing in the texturing workflow. I dont feel I have found a solid one yet. I am primarily using photoshop and ddo, because I really like a mask-centric workflow.
But I feel I am lacking the 3D paint side of it, especially when working on assets that need UV seams in places that are very obvious to the player.
Atm I get around it by making a "seam fix" layer in the end, on top of everything, but I would like to get away from destructive workflows.
3D Coat seems great for bringing layers to and from photoshop, but doesnt support masks as far as I know.
Neither does mudbox (?)
Mari is quite expensive, and doesnt support non-uniform textures, which we in games use a lot.
Basically I am hoping to find some way to combine 3D painting and photoshop layer masks.
So, what are you guys doing? What is your texturing workflow/software choices, and why?
Im interested in hearing what other people are doing in the texturing workflow. I dont feel I have found a solid one yet. I am primarily using photoshop and ddo, because I really like a mask-centric workflow.
But I feel I am lacking the 3D paint side of it, especially when working on assets that need UV seams in places that are very obvious to the player.
Atm I get around it by making a "seam fix" layer in the end, on top of everything, but I would like to get away from destructive workflows.
3D Coat seems great for bringing layers to and from photoshop, but doesnt support masks as far as I know.
Neither does mudbox (?)
Mari is quite expensive, and doesnt support non-uniform textures, which we in games use a lot.
Basically I am hoping to find some way to combine 3D painting and photoshop layer masks.
So, what are you guys doing? What is your texturing workflow/software choices, and why?
Replies
3D coat seems like the best option so far .. but I haven't really tried it yet.
I've been experimenting with modo's painting, and it works rather well.. but the sad part is, no psd layer support.. well actually there is.. but it's super awkward and clearly not finished. And it makes me mad.. it's such a key feature for many people.. ah well.
I prefer Mudbox for more realistic stuff than hand painting, the stencil system/3D projection painting just seemed to work better for me in that style. No reason why you can't use either though, they do a good job. There's also bodypaint and Mari, Mari looks amazing for texturing but kinda makes my computer chug as my PC is ancient
I've been trying 3D coat for a week and I must admit I am really impressed, I just want to handpaint the shit out of everything.
Yeah, heard about MODOs paint, and we might use MODO down the road at work anyway, so that would be great.
I will check more up on Mudbox, Torch. I just thought it didnt support one-click swapping of stuff to and from photoshop like coat does, with masks and everything. Will read more about it
Also, I used Mari at another studio, and it is by far the best texturing app in my opinion - as long as you are not doing game art!
EDIT: Hi Battlecow. thanks for chiming in! I read it supported masks, but I thought it was only its own masks, and when swapping between photoshop and coat they both would get lost. Is that incorrect?
You could save your 3d coat layers and masks individualy and rebuild everything in photoshop,it would make the swiching between apps annoying but it would work. Maybe you'll find that the painting tools are worth it as they do have a great feel to them.
I'm just curious though, how many of you guys have tried Max's Viewport Canvas? I use it from time to time and for an integrated piece of tool it's surprisingly powerful and flexible, it's completely layer based with masks and blend modes, paints across uv's, projection, cloning from screen, supports pressure sensitivity, adjustments and filters, interop with PS, you name it, if you work inside Max you should really give it a try..
But I would never use it to paint textures in because the way brush opacity works is completely stupid and hard to control
I need to mention that the last three strokes had an opacity of 5, 2 and 1, which is kinda odd to me, seems like a bug, so you'd need to work in the single digits for opacity to actually see it's effect, aside from that it works as expected...
Nowadays I don't use photoshop that often. The only instance i can think of using it is when I need a tileable texture. Is this what you mean by non-uniform textures? Sorry, I'm not familiar with the term.
Other than that I don't see anything that I can't do inside SD.
It's the result of the brush opacity multiplying with itself during a stroke, reducing the spacing corrects the stepping artifacts but worsens the opacity problem which is why you had to reduce the opacity to the single digits to get something useable. You can see this if you look at your example, turning the opacity way down turns your hard edged brush basically into a soft edged one. This is because the outer edges of the brush have fewer overlapping sections.
I made an image (visual approximation) to try to better explain this, but photoshop and 3dsm do the same thing, as you draw it lays down a bunch of textures (in this case hard circles) and they overlap to form the brush stroke. But in 3DS Max the overlapping parts multiply with themselves to create higher opacity, while in photoshop they do not.
I don't know if I would describe this as a bug, for whatever reason lots of developers implement their paint tools this way and I think it sucks
But 3D Coat and Photoshop all day, every day
3d coat is nice, its super fast, relatively easy to get meshes set up in. I really like that you can import more than one base diffuse/texture into one layer if you have multiple UV sets/meshes, has been super handy. I hate the fact that their eye dropper is not on ALT, but have gotten used to it I guess. It is also fast. Crashes infrequently, but most importantly is very responsive and fast. You can export a PSD of your texture with all the layers you built in 3dcoat easily.
For projection stuff, using Photoshop's projection painting has been all i need it for. It requires a little patience with clunky workflow, but its honestly perfect for that kind of work. 3d painting within Photoshop is also not always terrible, but most of the time its horrifically slow and you'd be much better off in another package. I've done full on things in it, but its so sluggish and unresponsive (on a powerful PC) at best.
my time is probably spent:
60% Photoshop
35% 3dCoat
5% Other
one problem I have been having is that I need to figure out a better workflow for saving RGB masks. Have a few ideas to write a script for it, but have been coming up short. Would love if Adobe fixed the layer group blending option.
If you're comfortable working like this and think it's a managable problem then I salute you.
For me the problem isn't managable, I can't get the quality I expect from my texture by painting with multiplying opacity.
Note, you may need to set Unlit Texture in 3d options. In CC that is a property of the Scene (3d Pallete). Not promising it'll work in older versions of PS, but should work fine in CC, tested in CS6 and 5 and it did not.
other notes:
with this, you're painting a texture in photoshop. To have multiple layers, you'll need to duplicate the 3d layer and set it to multiply.
if you make a new layer, paint, and merge down, it will mirror the drawing.
to get a "rasterized" version, you need to duplicate teh layers, and merge them to a non-3d layer.
if painting is slow, try reducing texture size by selecting the _PS_3d_Default texture in the 3d palette, and in the properties create a new diffuse of a smaller size. Can also reduce the image size of the doc to increase performance.
one final note, if the camera ever gets messed up, click the camera in the 3d pallete, and in the properties choose "Top" from the drop down.
I agree, Mari is very very nice. But I find it quite expensive. Maybe further down the road
By non-uniform I mean a ratio other than 1:1. I dont know if that is the correct term.
For example, a 2048 x 1024
Torch Thanks, but as I said in the first post it doesnt quite suit my needs
But for games it just seems like overkill. We cant quite afford it, for purely a texturing program.
I will look more into the SD!
Does anyone do a combination with 3D and DDO? DDO works purely because of layer masks, and those dont seem to transfer well into any 3D software, as far as I know.
oh ok. I see what you mean and that's a good point. theres a work around for it in mari, but it would take another couple steps of exporting out a couple patches and using photoshop to combine them into a single map.
I'm not sure if 2k $$ is really worth for it, when Substance Painter in commercial version will cost about 500$...
Moose how do you do this? I've been trying to import multiple meshes and connect up multiple textures or 1 mesh with multiple textures and can't figure a good way of how to pick what gets applied where.
On import, make sure you give a specific name to the UV set. I make a 'base' layer, and import textures to it. On Texture > Import Diffuse, if you have multiple named UVs you choose which UV set it goes to. When you import a new diffuse to that same layer, choose a different UV set from the drop down.
Can also keep layers cleaner too this way, by painting across all objects. When you export it only exports the contents of the layer per object, so you can have one 'dirt' layer that will export properly across all objects.
Prove it (;.
I see mari as software tailored for used in films.
And Substance Painter specially made for use in games. With features that are eactually usefull for games.
How do you choose which texture gets exported?
I tried Mari, but since it is projection only i find it very slow for game asset texturing. Mudbox has both projection and real 3d painting. Mari can be close to photoshop in terms of painting capability but it is too damn slow and too damn expensive for me.
nothing can beat Photoshop though when it comes to hand painting in 2D. with some saved PSD templates and some customized actions to speed up workflow, Photoshop really cant be beat in terms of quality and level of precision work that it can produce. I do a LOT of manual hand painting in my texture even when they are for hyper realistic assets, so Photoshop seems to be the only affordable tools that is stable, fast, and feature rich for now.
ddo, subtance designer/painter and other such tools dont offer the ability to create high quality work in my opinion. i have not yet seen anything done with either of them that didnt look very generic or procedural in nature. may be with time they will improve but for now they just seem like tools for mass production of low priority art assets.
http://vimeo.com/65408722
also read up on ready at dawns mari pipeline
http://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2013-shading-course/rad/s2013_pbs_rad_slides.pdf
I've become a huge 3d coat fan, its the one 3d painting tool in the past few years that does pretty much everything I want, is fast, and isn't overly complicated with mode switching/states (deep paint), bunch of stupid rules, etc. Only odd stuff to get used to is turning off Depth frequently, and dealing with finicky mouse-controlled brush sizing.
Maybe Substance Painter will get there at some point, but right now its lacking a lot of painting tools that Mari has. I don't have the time to list all the awesome features Mari has, but I can say that it works awesome for game art, and people shouldn't discredit it so quickly.
I still rather buy SD + SP.
Does mari have any procedurall automagic to generate lots of textures with several clicks ? If I have to paint every texture from scratch over and over again, it's way to much time wasted for me.
yes.
Projection painting in Photoshop has some bugs, I typically do any projections on separate layers, I've had too many instances where I projection paint the back of the model, rotate it around and paint the front only to find all my work on the back got deleted because I worked on the same layer.
I'd probably Zbrush though but my computer is old as dirt and can't handle many subdivisions.
you can see the brushes in this video, this is the guy that made the ones I use.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rT3JdHSxROU
and here is where you can get the blender brushes https://github.com/xrg81/brushes
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/mari/latest-mari-release/
Glad you liked this release. We've been working closely with our games customers to add functionality specific for next-gen games workflows. You will be seeing a lot more games published with Mari this year.
I'm happy to answer any questions you guys might have about Mari.
At the moment Mari doesn't support non-square textures, but it is something we're very aware of.
If anyone is interested there are some feature videos available for 2.6
Physically Based Shading and Layered Materials
https://vimeo.com/90974835
Environment Lighting
https://vimeo.com/90974834
Digging the new Layered materials, are there any new additions to easily setup multi channel painting?
Also you can share layers across channels (Diffuse, Spec, etc) So you can use your diffuse as a base for your spec and if you edit your Diffuse it will update across every channel you are using it for.
Lots of neat features. It does suck that it doesn't support non square textures but the workaround is pretty fast.
I keep seeing 3d coat videos and it looks really cool for straight up 3d painting so I may give it a try.