Quixel Suite and Seams
I'm not sure what im asking is related to this thread or not.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=139801
I was wondering how you guys deal with the texture seems that arise with using the Suite or most procedural texturing programs in general. I know a lot of this comes down to the strategic unwrapping and placement of UV seems to hide them, but I'm getting confused with how you deal with things like simple cylinders or tubes.
Lemme post a screenie to show what I'm talking about.
This is just my pipe model. Now as you can see here, there is a rather obvious seem. How do I get rid of it on all layers simultaneously, in the least painful way possible? I would love to hear your input as I've been really inspired by some of the demo videos of the environments that the Quixel people have showcased.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=139801
I was wondering how you guys deal with the texture seems that arise with using the Suite or most procedural texturing programs in general. I know a lot of this comes down to the strategic unwrapping and placement of UV seems to hide them, but I'm getting confused with how you deal with things like simple cylinders or tubes.
Lemme post a screenie to show what I'm talking about.
This is just my pipe model. Now as you can see here, there is a rather obvious seem. How do I get rid of it on all layers simultaneously, in the least painful way possible? I would love to hear your input as I've been really inspired by some of the demo videos of the environments that the Quixel people have showcased.
Replies
I would be very interested how you guys plan on implementing something like that. Is this going to be painting straight onto the model say like Mari or Mudbox. I assume you'll have some kind of super algorithm that will either be converting from ptex to regular textures or some form of poly painting then?
You know you guys could just make a standalone program! (HINT HINT) With the kinds of amazing prices you guys are charging, you would definitely make Algorithmic over there a little nervous. When I saw the freelancer pricing you had, I literally grabbed for my wallet.
DDO basicly only uses tilable textures that it puts on your texturemaps, tints using a certain color and then masks off all undesired areas.
so to get the material you just have to disable the layermask in photoshop, isolate that layer and save that out.
then when you projected that, you have to copy the projected texture over to your spec and gloss aswell and corect the levels so they are aligned with the rest of the map.
i would not recommend doing this inside the DDO project psd but rather after you are finished with DDo in a separete psd.
@nwopolygonshapeshifter - sorry i got confuesed a bit i should have been more clear, it wont be "painting" in that sense It will be more of avoiding probems at the seams rather than painting them out. So you wont be able to get textures tiling across seams, but dynamask details will fade out closer to the seam, making them less noticable.
To get textures to tile across seams, the uv have to be planned for it.
Sorry for any confusion, and great to hear that you like our prices
Goeddy thanks again for your help
That won't really work for some hard geometric shapes where you have no choice but to split your UVs along an edge to prevent distortion but still need texture to cross the seam (such as paint worn off of metal along the hard edge).
It looks like we'll still have to use *painting package of choice* to augment DDO with a workflow like Goeddy was saying.
For other use cases where you're not stuck with that constraint, however, 'avoiding problems at the seams' will definitely be helpful so I'm excited for that update.
OT: Yes, pricing good. Me like pricing. :poly128:
I'd be curious what you use as your primary painting package of choice? Ive tried mudbox but the issue I see here is simultaneously affecting all layers at once. My biggest concern here would of course, be the normal map layers which have a drastic effect on shading.
i use mudbox for this, its just the quickest way for me.
the normal layers that ddo creates are usually rather subtle, so you can just paint out the effects with a flat normal color for the seam area and then merge that with your ddo created normal layer, so you still got your original baked normals below.
you could use mari to paintproject onto multiple channels at once, but mari is extremely expensive so most studios don't use it.
the other alternative would be substance painter i gues, but i havn't tried that yet, so i don't know if that works well or not.
>M-Muh seams
>2015
Like it was said before: I don't mind fixing the seams myself but doing it across multiple layers is a giant headache because there's no reliably fast way of editing multiple layers or even documents in exactly the same way at exactly the same time.
This issue of seams, if I'm honest, is the single major flaw of the entire package and the one thing I want fixing the most. I'm very disappointed.
As stated before: From the technical limitations you've described, texture projection onto the mesh itself seems ideal for solving the seams: Just projecting feathered images along the seams specifically to plug up the gaps where they're detected. Its crude but it would probably work in 99% of cases.
The Only Way to Avoid UV Seams You can spend all day making low-compression UVs. And I mean all day which let's be honest: Nobody wants to do that. Time is money: I use your software because it saves me time which makes me money and because it empowers me as an artist. You can nip this in the bud guys, come on: I'd be happy to buy an entirely new licence as a sort of big "3.0" leap for DDO just for this specific problem to be fixed.