How long does it take you to make a material?

Turband

I am just making the final touches to my chain mail material. It has taken me 6 hours so far. My material has different user changeable settings like rust, dirt, blood, age, shape, etc. I think i might go 1 or 2 more hours into it. I have so far 2-3 Months of substance experience. I was wondering if I took too long to do it, also how long does it take you to do a material, and or what is the expected time for a material to be done in the industry.

Cheers.

Edit: BTW I finished the material. 
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oOOkOL

poopipe

In a production setting on a game with a relatively minimal art style (i.e. Not uncharted) 

We usually allow 2 days for basic stuff like brick walls. 
Something more complex like a woodland floor could take a week. 
They tend to be 4metre tiles authored at 10 pixels/cm. We don't generally put much in the way of wear or dirt on base materials, that stuff all gets done as separate passes and basically counts as a material in its own right.

A lot of the time goes into testing surface response in game and general testing for scale, composition etc.   
Feedback loops usually add a day per iteration but that's more to do with art director's schedules than how long it takes to do the work.

Turband

poopipe said:

We don't generally put much in the way of wear or dirt on base materials, that stuff all gets done as separate passes and basically counts as a material in its own right.

Are you referring to Vertex Painting? That's an interesting Texel density 4000*4000. I guess that way it is harder to see repetition. The chain mail I made is to be used on 4 characters in our school project. When my group lead asked me to make it, I thought to be more useful to have a fully customizable material, to add more consistency in the texturing of each character. If let's say I was a material artist, and I hand down this material to the character artist, will he discard my changes? find it useful, weird?

Edit: BTW I finished the material. 
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oOOkOL

poopipe

It's 10.24 px/cm to be completely accurate. 

We do large tiles because we need to cover large areas like the sides of buildings/ terrain etc. The hyper detailed 20cm squares that you see plastered over artstation are completely useless in practice. 

I didn't mean vertex painting, we keep dirt etc as separate layers and apply it when constructing textures in either designer or painter. 

As far as artists making use of your customisable material goes.. You'd hope they would but there's no guarantee 

zachagreg

Hey poopipe when you mention the 20cm squares, you're referring to just the default meshes that SD uses right? 

Taylor Brown

Tacking.on to zachagreg's question. If I wanted to emulate studio conditions when creating materials, what should my initial settings be in SD?

poopipe

zachagreg said:

Hey poopipe when you mention the 20cm squares, you're referring to just the default meshes that SD uses right? 

I just mean that a lot of the very high detail material patches you see on artstation etc. are too small to be of any practical use in a real game. 

Taylor:   it depends very much on the type of game, the engine, view distances and the target platform I'm afraid.

The best advice I can give is pick a texel density and stick to it so your scales are consistent. 

zachagreg

Thank you poopipe, also two cents for Turband in one of Daniel Thiger's tutorial videos he said on average it takes around 15hrs to fully create one of his materials. More complex ones will of course take more time

Taylor Brown

Thanks, that's a pretty obvious answer that I should've realized on my own