How did he do this? (texture baking)

carrillo40

i am currently working on a bird creature and came across this model by Tyler Smith https://www.artstation.com/artwork/vk13a 
how did he bake all the feathers textures on a single plane? did he just texture everything in zbrush with polypaint? what about reflectivity and gloss?

carrillo40

i found this break down and its great but how would you add the color and everything else to each feather after? https://www.artstation.com/contests/feudal-japan/challenges/53/submissions/37602

Ashervisalis

It could be done with any texturing software (Substance, Photoshop, etc) or even poly painted when making feather variations.

carrillo40

Ashervisalis said:

It could be done with any texturing software (Substance, Photoshop, etc) or even poly painted when making feather variations.

so you'd have to texture the high poly in substance? 

Ashervisalis

No no, make your low poly, bake the normals/AO/curvature/etc, then paint the colours and roughness in Substance Painter onto the low poly. Alternatively, use ZBrush to poly paint, then bake the vertex colours onto the low poly.

carrillo40

Ashervisalis said:

No no, make your low poly, bake the normals/AO/curvature/etc, then paint the colours and roughness in Substance Painter onto the low poly. Alternatively, use ZBrush to poly paint, then bake the vertex colours onto the low poly.

i understand that . i just don't know how he made all the feathers within a single plane have the same diffuse. i seems like the same colors on every feather. perhaps he just used generators and drove the diffuse with the bump. that's why it looks like all the feathers are the same. well thank you for the help.

Alex_J

why do you think all the feathers UV's are stacked? 

I didn't see a 2d viewer in the marmoset scene. Does it say somewhere else that they are all stacked?

I would expect the artist makes a handful of unique feathers, textures them, and then places them by hand. Same as you do haircards. Not every single feather is unique, just a handful. So it seems like they are each unique. Why would it be different than that? Did I miss something?

carrillo40

see how all of the feathers are in a single plane? i know how to back multiple high polys on a plane. no problem. 

but the diffuse. i thought he might've painted every single one but i think he just used a generator . which is why the color doesn't vary as much.
@BIGTIMEMASTER

Alex_J

hmm, i might be misunderstanding. I would expect he made a single feather first, painted it (could just be vertex paint in zbrush), duplicated it a few times and made small tweaks in color and shape, and then just duplicated those and placed them by hand. Then baked them all onto the wing geometry. 

If it is vertex paint then you can bake that into a texture map. So simple enough if that was the way. That's the way I think I would do it. Then of course in your texturing app you can add more color or whatever on top of that vertex color-to-base color map.

Does that make sense? Not saying that is the way the artist did it, but it is a way you could do it that doesn't require anything special. A pretty straight forward workflow just requires a little planning up front. 

And have you written to the artist? No guarantee you'll get a reply but it can't hurt.