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Texturing Then v. Now

dar0005
polycounter lvl 6
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dar0005 polycounter lvl 6
I was wondering it is now more common to use texturing programs like substance,3D Coat, and DDO then to use Photoshop from start to finish?

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  • Obscura
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    Obscura grand marshal polycounter
    In short, yes, but this depends on some things. Like the tool set of the company, art style,pipeline , etc. I know some companies who use that hand painted texture style, and they want their artists to do it by hand, in Photoshop. Some other companies will let you decide as long as it provides the same look \ quality like Riot Games or Blizzard. The biggest and best benefit of using something like Substance or DDO is that you can work on all the maps simultanously. An another benefit of these softwares in general is that you work directly on the mesh in a 3d viewport so you don't really need to care\compensate the stretching,rotation etc so its way easier and more accurate without much effort. 

    In my experience, Substance Designer is extremely powerful , when it comes to tileable textures. In the past, you would had to make highpoly and bake normals, height, occlusion, idmaps and other stuff. In SD you can make all of these in a few clicks, without a need for hours of sculpting or modeling, baking etc. It entirely changed my texturing process, and I wouldn't even think about going back to the traditional method.
  • gnoop
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    gnoop sublime tool
    IMO there is no simple answer.   For quick texturing  of 3d props   DDO and Substance Painter are very good.   Still for  projecting  an exact  photo   to a certain model  precisely,  nothing beats Photoshop 3d mode , not even Mari.    

    For tileable    textures SD is powerful indeed  , Also very helpful for secondary things.    Something where artificial procedural nature is not that matter.  Still I prefer Photoshop to compose most important and visually dominant environment materials  from photoscanned sources.    Even recent SD  addition , "Material Height blend",  somehow more controllable  in Photoshop 32 bit mode, being done from groups and layer linking.  
       For some specific tilable details, tire tracks for example,  neither Photoshop nor SD are good enough and you would do better with vector soft . Like Inkscape or Microsoft Design for example.  SD svg node is hardly convenient at all.
  • CreativeSheep
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    CreativeSheep polycounter lvl 8
    I prefer doing my textures from strictly Photoshop.  The only alternative I like is Mari but I don't use it.
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