Texturing for film rather than games

Lite

I wanted to start a new project and would like to jump into modeling/texturing for film instead of games for the first time. In the past I have toyed with rendering using mental ray and things but would like to make something professional looking for the ole portfolio. The textures always seem to come out flat or boring even with normal or height maps when I render them outside of a game engine.

If anyone has any advice for me especially where texturing is concerned I would love the hear from you. I feel like it's going to be mainly up to my render settings but I'm going to get to that once I start digging into the scene. If there's anything anyone has learned from working in both games and film related to modeling too I would be grateful for the insights! Though mostly I am not worried about modeling.

I will be working in Maya, Zbrush, and Photoshop with the final rendering to be done in Maya most likely mental ray...

Thanks All!
Cheers.

Mask_Salesman

I've only worked in games but it seems to me that with games turning to PBR, the workflows are now more similar than ever being that's what film CG uses, the core difference still being realtime for games.

Blond

I think that for films, you want to use alot of displacement map, procedural textures and ptex for high detailed textures.

Normals are still used but probably for micro-thin details like scratches and such.

Procedurals are stuff like that: http://youtu.be/-2F-ba_nLZs?t=23m56s

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

You might learn more here:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-514285.html

Rwolf

Blond wrote: »

I think that for films, you want to use alot of displacement map, procedural textures and ptex for high detailed textures.

Normals are still used but probably for micro-thin details like scratches and such.

Procedurals are stuff like that: http://youtu.be/-2F-ba_nLZs?t=23m56s

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

You might learn more here:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-514285.html

Yes, No, And Photos for all the textures. (interestingly enough, texture artist will paint out the shadows to get rid of the natural baked in shadows)

Normal maps no, bump textures yes. There is no point of normals really, we model the much as we can, and trivial fine detail is bump and disp maps.

I'd say 50% of the picture will be shaders, lighting and rendering.

Clark Coots

I have a friend who spoke with Justin Holt one time, and I believe he said, most textures are photo sourced, but on very very large scale things like terrain, some procedural noise can be blended in to break up some tiling and add random variation.

That's funny Blond, I know Arthur the guy who made that eye tutorial! Went to school with him.