Texturing high poly models

Cbonez888

Hey there, 

I was wondering how artists texture their high poly / high production assets not intended for game use. Do they unwrap thier high poly models and paint the textures in a software? Are material attributes handled with maps? Ex. A shiny spaceship with dirt and damages that doesn't reflect. 

Id love to see a workflow of a high poly composition with different materials etc.  I'm pretty comfortable with a high to low poly bake workflow for games but have pondered what the procedure for models in TV/ Movies.


I apologize for the noob question

Cheers,

Thanks

Deadly Nightshade

Models not meant for real-time rendering needs to be UV-unwrapped too, but using a technique called multi-tile UV mapping. You go for as high TD as possible while keeping all UV-shells uniform in TD, with as little distortion and pinching as possible (so multiple 4096 textures). This is a completely different way to how you UV-unwrap something for a game engine: you need to optimize.

There is also possible to use 3D textures and skip UV-unwrapping alltogether. That's probably what Marek Denko is using.

Cbonez888

Thanks for the reply Deadly Nightshade, it was starting to get lonely here.

That's some great info and I think I've got a solid starting point to start doing some research. Just to confirm TD = Texture definition?

Thanks again

JedTheKrampus

In this case he means texel density.

EarthQuake

Look into Mari, it's very common for highpoly/film texturing workflows.

Other than that, it's nowhere near as standardized as what you'll typically see in games. Materials might be made up from any combination of uv unwrapped and hand painted textures, to procedural materials without uvs. Pretty much anything that will render in the 3d app of choice will work.

From what I understand, pixar does very little unwrapping and hand working of materials, instead they have a cool material system that uses a lot of procedural effects. I was at a interesting talk by Chris Burrows and he covered it a bit, but I can't remember the name of the tool they were using for setting up materials. At any rate, the workflow seemed similar to what you might set up in Quixel Suite or Substance.