How To PBR On A Budget - Feedback Requested

theblueturtle_

Happy Friday guys!

I've been working this one a while and I think it's about time to get some feedback. Ended up deviating from the concept slightly because of personal preference but I liked the look overall and wanted to stay relatively close to the original idea. As the title implies I had to do some painstaking PS since I don't have substance or ddo so let me know what you think. Rendered in toolbag2.

Any feedback would be appreciated.




 Concept by Oscar Cafaro.

RobeOmega

Is this meant to be for real time? If it is then you should consider how many polygons you are using for this model. Try taking it down to around 8-10,000 from 44,000 if you can.

theblueturtle_

hey! i didn't give myself a tri budget for this one. My focus was on the textures more so than triangle count. I could definitely optimize it down quite a bit if I need a game res version. thanks for the feedback

almighty_gir

If you can't afford dDo or Substance, you can still do PBR relatively easily.

It goes like this:
Prototype your materials in Toolbag2, or UE4 (if you have literally no money at all, then unreal). And at this point you should just be looking at Albedo, Metallic, and Roughness values. That's all.

Once you know the base values of your materials, create a group in photoshop for each material. In each group you'll have a layer for Albedo, a layer for Roughness, and a layer for Metallic.

Then you mask off the entire group, and start painting the material back on by adding white to the mask.

A simple photoshop action for hiding and unhiding layers based on name suffixes (ie: steel_ALBEDO) and saving them out to the appropriate texture maps and you're done.

theblueturtle_

@almighty_gir thanks for the post! I'm glad you mentioned this because prototyping in toolbag is exactly how I went about getting my base values for this. I started making some test materials and then breaking them down into their individual  grayscale and color values. Then I setup a quick collection of swatches to  reference those values as I went along painting my textures.

There are a couple reasons I chose photoshop for is. First I wanted to use this project as a way to drive home the principles behind the PBR workflow on the lowest level. The second reason is I'm still on the fence between dDo and the substance tools. On the one hand I have experience using the Quixel suite and my experience has been really good so far but at the same time substance seems to be the new standard in the industry for PBR textures. I've heard good and bad things on both sides. Any thoughts on this? What is your preferred toolset?

BucketOfNuggets

Quixel is a lot easier to pick up and get your head around. It is a lot cheaper too.

On the other hand though Quixel is a pretty clunky program to use as it can take a fair bit of time waiting for textures to apply an update. Substance is a program built from the ground up so it runs a lot more smoothly but has it's annoyances too. No option to render screen shots and you have to download the entire program manually with each update. Also the supplied materials in substance seem to be less than Quixel but there website has free once constantly being added which is great.

I'm still pretty new to PBR but those are my experiences so far.

theblueturtle_

Thanks for sharing your experience @LanceUppercut. The more I talk to fellow artists the more I lean toward substance for the reasons you just mentioned. I do think the Quixel Suite is awesome overall but it looks like I may have to go with Substance in the future. Anyone else want to share their experiences?

Any comments on the helmet to this point? How did I do?

almighty_gir

theblueturtle_ said:

@almighty_gir thanks for the post! I'm glad you mentioned this because prototyping in toolbag is exactly how I went about getting my base values for this. I started making some test materials and then breaking them down into their individual  grayscale and color values. Then I setup a quick collection of swatches to  reference those values as I went along painting my textures.

There are a couple reasons I chose photoshop for is. First I wanted to use this project as a way to drive home the principles behind the PBR workflow on the lowest level. The second reason is I'm still on the fence between dDo and the substance tools. On the one hand I have experience using the Quixel suite and my experience has been really good so far but at the same time substance seems to be the new standard in the industry for PBR textures. I've heard good and bad things on both sides. Any thoughts on this? What is your preferred toolset?

Setting up swatches is cool and all. But the reason i suggested setting up material layers and having them compiled into folders which you then mask on and off is that you don't have to worry about painting each map separately. You avoid any mis-matching or inaccuracies between the albedo and metallic maps lining up for example, because you're masking both of them on/off at the same time through the folder mask.

My personal preference at the moment is Substance... the combination of designer and painter is incredibly powerful and painter alone is an excellent software to use. I've moved my entire workflow over to substance tools pretty much (though it's always good to learn/know quixel AND substance. never know what the client will want!). Once you understand the substance tools there are things you can do with them that to my knowledge, you just can't with quixel (anisotropic direction map ooooooo yes).

Both tools are incredibly powerful, and will speed up your workflow greatly.

theblueturtle_

I hear you, man. Painting each layer separately definitely does not work as a long-term workflow solution. It was brutal but I did learn quite a bit through this process. Substance seems like the best option at this point after hearing from you guys and my other artist buddies. Much appreciated guys!
Anyone have any critiques or comments about the helmet specifically? If not I think I may call it done after a few more adjustments. I also want to try out a few color alternatives. Marmoset viewer update to come at some point.