Industry Texturing Workflow Question
polycounter lvl 6
Do artists typically use scanned materials and/or photo-sourced texture libraries in the industry? Is this the case for both PBR and non-pbr workflows? Thank you.
Handpainted - such as World of Warcraft, League of Legends
PBR - such as Remember Me, Metal Gear Solid 5, Killzone: Shadows Fall
Photosourced - textures used that are altered. I can't think of any specific games.
Handpainted - such as World of Warcraft, League of Legends
PBR - such as Remember Me, Metal Gear Solid 5, Killzone: Shadows Fall
Photosourced - textures used that are altered. I can't think of any specific games.
Replies
Maybe for some detail/ noise overlay, bur there is no reason why you would need photos for texturing.
Can't speak for majority, but I know I use real photos to achieve real results. Also something like Megascans, or Textures.com (improved CGtextures) wouldn't become a thing if others didn't too.
I think they don't use any other textures.
Here's another online resource for high quality scan based textures: http://www.surfacemimic.com
o_O
Dayummmmm. Might have to get me a subscription to that!
Most people pull elements out of photographs and use some amount of painting over top to get the look they want.
Just a little confused here.
I like www.episcura.com for images, they have a lot of tiled images, and a nice interface,some HDRI as well.
Texturing takes a lot of time and practice to master, most people won't use just one source for images, when I create a texture I use a lot of overlays and whatever photo sources I can find that might fit the texture I am needing.
Theoretical 3d scan or photograpy is the "easy" way, but you need a real life template and so it can be very hard to find or not exist.
With hand painted texture you have the freedom but it can be very hard to make good looking textures.
Often it is a mix like raw color variation with hand and fine details like stains from a photography.
From my personal standpoint i like hand painted or heavy modified textures more because the look smoother in motion. With to much information density and fast color changes in textures the game looks often only good when you stand still and has a unsettled feeling in motion.
You should use photosourcing when it saves you time and doesn't give an inferior result. Games these days generally do not paste photos directly onto the UVs and call it done (though some in the past did little more than that, see: Max Payne), however, there are many, many ways in which you can use photo source to create various material effects.
Whether the game is using a PBR workflow is really neither here nor there. Your game could be stylized with every pixel of every texture painted by hand, and still use a PBR system, and it could be heavily reliant on photosourcing and not use a physically accurate rendering system. These concepts don't have much to do with each other and are not mutually inclusive or exclusive.
So no big difference with texturing approach actually. Just a few nuances. No necessity to go crazy measuring everything at all imo.
As of depth and normal channel it's a different matter. I am trying to do almost everything through photogrammetry now.
I would gladly use 3d party libraries but it's usually too much of a headache with rights managing, subcontract agreements, risk insurances, persuading the companies etc.
So mostly it's our own photos.
The guy who runs surface mimic has a very precise photogrammetry setup. What you are getting is real depth information and not some software based estimation assuming the photograph is a height map. The quality of the processing work and manipulation he does is also good.