Advice about texturing software to add to a pipeline

PoLLuX

Hello everyone,

Recently I've been working in a project that requires a extreme detail in the texturing and material creation phase. The textures are created based on real photos of real materials and we need to match them as close as we can.

In this pipeline we use Maya and Vray for the modeling and rendering, but for the texturing and materials we've been experimenting lots of choices out there, like Quixel Suite, MindTex, Knald, ShaderMap3, PixPlant and others. 

I would like to know if any of you can offer some advice in which one will have a easier integration with Vray. Any kind of advice would be awesome on this, from previous experiences you had, maybe.

Just as a pointer, the kind of maps we are extracting are normal map, specular/gloss map, AO, displacement/height map. 

Any other info you need to give some advice, please just ask .

Thanks in advance, and sorry for the long post

merwynl

I believe Quixel Suite has an export setting preset for Vray. Not sure what maps are included in that preset but you can add additional maps if you want.  

JedTheKrampus

Mari has got a builtin VrayMtl shader if you like being able to easily see the result of your texture while you paint it. Plus, it's the only real choice for creating "extreme detail" like you say in your OP. You can easily put 100 or more 2k textures on a model and Mari can mostly handle it gracefully if you've got a good SSD and a good GPU.

PoLLuX

Thanks for your advice guys

Quixel Suite is my personal favorite, since I used it in some personal projects and with the version 2 it's even better, I'm not sure about the Vray preset though, but I'll check it out. The problem with Quixel Suite in this moment is the price, since its for commercial use, we are looking for something with a lower price.

Never thought about Mari, since it's really for painting the textures, and I take the blame there, because I might have complicated a bit in my OP. What I mean with extreme detail is a perfect interpretation of the physical material that we took photograph, and we want to extract the best normal map, displacement, specular, etc, that we can get. Sorry for the bad explanation in this.

I've been testing Knald lately and I really like the results I'm getting right at the start in its 3D preview. I have to test the maps in Vray to see of I get the same result, and there's where my problem lies. I want to extract good maps and get the same interpretation in the 3D Viewer and in Vray. I hope this time I explained myself better here

The project is pretty straightforward, we just have the photograph to work on, no painting needed, I just need the maps to match the properties of the real material.

Thanks again