Textures vs Shaders

JohannesAg

Hey guys, sorry if this is the wrong place to post this but I didn´t see anyplace where this would belong.

So I was looking into how Epic textured their Paragon characters by basicly just painting Id maps and then setting up shaders in engine for diffirent materials. I saw Naughty Dog doing similar stuff on a panel somewhere and now I´m wondering. Is this kind of thing the standard for texturing triple A characters now? or is the "old" way still the way most guys are doing it? 

poopipe

It depends.

Layered shaders are comparatively expensive per pixel  and don't make a lot of sense in terms of memory unless you're making wide use of them.  As such you won't see them used in many games, especially those where the content on screen cannot be carefully curated (Eg. The order has them because its very curated) 

JohannesAg

@poopipe makes sense, so this isn´t widely used? like when I boot up God of War or something comparable am I just looking at texture sheets and not this type of thing?  Basicly why I´m asking is because i´m working in a small indie studio and some guys there want to take this approach to texturing the characters in our current project. And though it looks really neat, I am a little sceptical about it, particularly as we don´t have a dedicated shader artist around.

Alex_J

Have you seen these?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVes6OUyzdw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDQwUNrvpDQ

Alot of that stuff is over my head, but the gist I got was that the main reason for the pipeline was long-term sustainability. Like, bringing in new artist all they got to do is mix/match these modular materials to easily crank out new characters.

JohannesAg

@Alex Javor    I´ve seen the first one but not the second one, thanks man. Yeah the long term thing makes a lot of sense. I wonder how much sense it makes for a more "normal" circumstance though. I did see that insomniac used some tiling stuff on spiderman´s suit but I haven´t seen any widespread use of this technique as far as I know and I´m wondering if there is a good reason for it.

poopipe

I'm not sure what they did in god of war (haven't played it) but bear in mind that's a full size AAA studio and presumably a proprietary engine. 
There's lots of ways to increase perceived texture detail without going full layered - detail maps being very common. 

Setting the stuff up in unreal is easy, the problem is going to be what happens if it turns out you can't afford it later?
You need to profile it on your lowest spec target platform as early as you can cos reworking the assets won't be any fun at all. 

Practically speaking, I suspect doing characters will be fine,  as long as you're not talking about crowds and you'll be able to use it on large hero assets as well.

RacePeaceDay

Some patterns are 1024 textures tiled many times, and it looks much better than baked 4k texture. Look Steel character for example. It will even look good not in ultra settings. Some of materials may have different fuzz (cloth, leather) or fresnel sheen (metals).. scratches on metal are tiled again.

Extra details can be disabled in low settings, I think it looks better without scratches in low settings, than blurry pixelated scratches.

Different textures can have different mipmap settings (sharpen, blur, or default), it looks better case by case depends on texture.

They also doing greyscale texture and then making 2 colors with float3 nodes and lerp, not sure why they doing that, probably because some colors are lost after DXT compression, or so they can tweak in engine in context of scene, without having to rebake every time. Or to have different colored skins.

RGB masks have better looking compression than DXT1 or 5 I think, though I never tested that.

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For environment also makes sense because textures are triplanar projected in shader, stones can be scaled many times and texture wont become blurry. There are also baked masks for dirt, alternate stone color or moss.