Texturing dilemma...

loggie24

I have been battling myself for the past 6 months when it comes down to texturing.

Highpoly
Photosourcing

Why is this a dilemma you might ask yourself, why not one or the other, why not both? Well, it's simple. I want into the industry within a few years. I feel like creating highpoly sculpts and baking/texturing yourself is more professional and the "industry standard". Yet, i see things like CGT and upcoming Megascans which offer a wast array of high quality tileables, i want to use them as well, but i can't force myself to it.

It's always highpoly highpoly highpoly, even if i find an amazing tileable photosource, highpoly... I want to love photosourcing, but i can't.

I feel like the only way i will get anywhere in this industry is if i can make ANYTHING without the use of photosourcing, and not only because my brain thinks it, it's also because i want it. I know this probably is wrong, but it's such a strong thought...

Probably a bit stupid dilemma, but getting other peoples opinion always helps me out because sometimes i just can't think or decide for myself...

Deathstick

Whatever works the best for whatever you're particularly doing. Of course it's great to be able to do both well.

One thing to possibly keep in mind when working professionally (not portfolioly) is that there are things like production costs and time constraints, so it's best to work smart. (IE, I could manually spend time drawing out every single piece of scratch and dirt by hand in photoshop using only the hard and soft brush tool, but is that the most effective use of my time? Wouldn't it speed up time to use curvature and ambient occlusion maps for masking as a base, and then I'd change the details by hand and have more free time to polish the asset as a whole? Etc.)

If something is going to turn out to be about 99% the same result in half the time, chances are you'll want to do it so you save time, and now have more time to work on other areas or polish it further than you would of been able to with a longer, drawn out process.

If you do photosourcing though, make sure you actually know how to photosource from scratch. As in taking a photo and zeroing out the lighting, shadows, color correcting, fixing areas up, being able to fix any problems like camera skewing, being able to merge textures (grab some grit from here, rubble from there, stains from there, throw in some decals and trims of color overlays etc.) and of course making it tileable/seamless.

Don't look at photosourcing as cheating, you might as well say using baked out maps from your highpoly sculpt to texture is cheating as well. It's just another process in your toolbelt that you should know when to use. The only thing you should really be concerned about is is the process I am using going to fit in with the project's art direction.

Time is the enemy in production.

Neox

i am not quite sure where your dilemma is, it's not like highpoly models give you any texture, it gives you some info for the texturing but you will still probably either handpaint or photosource your textures over the baked lowpoly

beefaroni

I think it comes down to whatever method looks good and gets the job done.

At least here, people have different texturing methods. At the end of the day, they have to hit a certain quality within a deadline. How they achieve that is up to them.

I'll add that in all of my interviews, my texturing process was never questioned unless it was for modular tile sheets. In fact, UV layout and LP optimization came up in almost all of them.

CafeNight

may be there is all about should this guy sculpting materials-surface in zbrush or just make something and adding materials created in Substance Designer or Photoshop(ndo.ddo) with HQ details
for example you can do make leather. Sculpt it, adding noise modifier etc or just adding texture. as I see, really dont sure what question about. its all about different metods.
for Order1986 they sculpting every thing surface and just use Mari

AtticusMars

The reason why people source their maps from a high poly is because it generates the best results.

We've come a long way from the days of crazybump but there are still serious limitations to the quality of normal/height maps you can generate from a photograph.

This isn't an ideological choice the industry has made because they think photos are cheats and real artists model shit from scratch.

Neox

AtticusMars wrote: »

The reason why people source their maps from a high poly is because it generates the best results.

We've come a long way from the days of crazybump but there are still serious limitations to the quality of normal/height maps you can generate from a photograph.

This isn't an ideological choice the industry has made because they think photos are cheats and real artists model shit from scratch.

are we talking about normalmaps or textures? because no matter how much you model/sculpt you will still have to texture either your high to bake it, or your low after baking.

i really don't understand where the problem is you will need both anyways

AtticusMars

I am assuming he is talking about generating normals/height from a photo vs. modeling it. (Otherwise why mention the highpoly?)

Could be wrong, I don't understand the original post that well either...

Add3r

With Neox on this one. Though, I will say a lot of studios shy away from the services that provide texture sources due to licensing costs and what not. Getting assets through legal without a hitch is usually very expensive and very risky. You'd be surprised the shit that gets pointed out and a cease and desist ordered, so you will see a lot of studios provide the time for full blown content creation to avoid this.

loggie24

I know this is a wierd dilemma, but hang on. The entire point of me asking this is out of insecurity. I don't know what i want to focus on, wether it's getting really good at taking photographs and using them on my assets, or creating my textures ground up, which i feel is necessary to be a good artist. Sculpting is inneffective but can easily yield the best resaults, photosourcing is easier and requires less time, yet the quality tends to suffer.

Neox

but sculpting does not give textures, if you are asking which way would be better to create textures, i would say pick the tougher route, it will help you more in the long run

loggie24

When i say sculpting, i mean building the texture from ground up. Sculpting->render->texture.

CafeNight

Neox wrote: »

but sculpting does not give textures, if you are asking which way would be better to create textures, i would say pick the tougher route, it will help you more in the long run

well texture its just name for surface + color or idk how its explane
you can just sculpt wood, rock or whatever you want take bump map and colorize it in PS and use it for something cool

Neox

you can bake out normals, ao and whatnot, but it still would not result in final textures, for stylized material you could go pretty far, but photorealistic stuff just from bakes? where does the color information and variation come from? where the specular values, glossines etc?

Noren

I think he's talking about doing the textures from scratch as seperate models.
E.g, modeling a brick wall, rock or ground and texturing that highpoly, maybe procedurally, before baking it as opposed to photosourcing a complete texture without that step.