Scanning (ground) textures - how to make them tileable...? (photogrammetry)

Jonathan85

So lets say, you use photogrammetry/scanning of a "flat" (ground) surfaces like ehm.. ground :-), or a brick wall etc. - somewhat "flat" surfaces. You want to make them tilable - ALL the maps (diffuse, normal, displacement etc.) What programs to use to make the process of making them tileable as EASY and as fast as possible? You have to make all the maps tilable at once, the "painting out" of seams must match on all maps exactly.

AFAIK the best aproach so far is to paint it out manually (all the maps at once) in Substance painter.

But is there even better/easier/faster solution?

For example, the best solution AFAIK is to use the program from Artomatix

https://artomatix.com/artengine/

, which DOES automatically removed seams on ALL the textures of the scan AT ONCE and make them ALL TILEABLE, with only few clicks, automatic. Its beautiful really... But the program is "weird", im not sure how much it costs, they dont provide price AFAIK, you must "ask them" (wtf) and its weird, maybe still in beta i dont know.

SO... can the same (AUTOMATIC seam removal of ALL MAPS (diffuse, displacement, normal etc.) AT ONCE/SAME TIME and make it tileable) can this be done in the same way (more or less) as artomatix does it but in another program? Doesnt SUbstance painter offer some automatic seam removal?

How about substance designer...? Isnt there some "node" that does this? "Automatic seam removal"?

I know you can remove automaticly seams and make the texture tilable in substance other program - Bitamp2Material, and its automatic. BUT (!) its not really meant for processing scan image data, AFAIK, it only works with diffuse (!) , makes it tileable, and ONLY THEN extracts the displacement and normals etc. JUST and ONLY from the diffuse, which are of course not at all as high quality as the original scan data of normals/displacement etc.

SO... Is there some program that makes me process scan data and make it tileable, automaticly remove seams? I would think substance painter and designer can do this now, but im not sure (im not really familiar with both programs)... ?? Or is Artomatix really so far the only way for this?

Noors

Yes substance designer has several nodes to make bitmaps tile.
"smart auto tile" would be the tool you're looking for.
https://docs.substance3d.com/sddoc/smart-auto-tile-159451090.html

Jonathan85

wow thanks.

But important question - does this node, or other work SIMULTANEOUSLY the same on all maps (diffuse, spec, displacement, normals etc,ú at the same time? And all the changes are IDENTICAL across all the maps?

(thank you! :-)  )

gnoop

It does for sure but don't  expect anything really smart from it . It works for subjects having small high frequency depth variations  and just does a kind of zigzagged  slightly blurred seam .  Nothing more.

  You have to kill any low and middle  frequency (maccro) height or color variations in the subject basically killing what makes photogrammetry scan look true real.

In my experience even Artomatix ( we payed it till last year fall)  while great in general couldn't do it smart enough with really complex photogrammetry  subjects  etc.  

Nothing beats an old good manual way  where you could control a flow of both micro and  macro details through the texture borders.     Photoshop or any program that can record your actions to be repeated then on a next channel could do it.    Substance Painter is actually not that great for that too. It only has a pretty primitive clone tool, nothing to re-shuffle fragments manually ( in simple manner at least) for proper cross border flow like you could with smart objects in Photoshop.

Jonathan85

gnoop said:

It does for sure but don't  expect anything really smart from it . It works for subjects having small high frequency depth variations  and just does a kind of zigzagged  slightly blurred seam .  Nothing more.

  You have to kill any low and middle  frequency (maccro) height or color variations in the subject basically killing what makes photogrammetry scan look true real.

In my experience even Artomatix ( we payed it till last year fall)  while great in general couldn't do it smart enough with really complex photogrammetry  subjects  etc.  

Nothing beats an old good manual way  where you could control a flow of both micro and  macro details through the texture borders.     Photoshop or any program that can record your actions to be repeated then on a next channel could do it.    Substance Painter is actually not that great for that too. It only has a pretty primitive clone tool, nothing to re-shuffle fragments manually ( in simple manner at least) for proper cross border flow like you could with smart objects in Photoshop.

Thanks, could you tell how much did you (one person or a studio?) payed for Artomatix? (perpetual or year license?) they dont have a price on website...

Also, im not aware/sure how smart objects in Photoshop can help in making textures tileable... like what would be the workflow... do you have some link at hand?

(thank you)

gnoop

It's not me it's company I am working for who bought it. I am afraid I am not free to disclose any details.  We have super tight non-disclosure, sorry. 

With smart objects I meant   you could make pieces of your photogrammetry scan smart objects,  put height or whatever  channels inside those smart objects and save them as  layercomps for easy switching.   

Then you could re-shuffle those pieces for better cross border flow , puppet wrap it  for better each other matching etc .   Equalize depth/height  to get rid of sudden steps with typical blur/hipass etc.

In a word whatever you could do in Substance Designer Photoshop can do too mostly  plus very important ability to manually pick a thing and deform it slightly to what you need exactly.   

 You would sometimes  get really crazy stack of layers ( for depth combine for example)  with linked smart objects  clipped by a group of another smart objects all wrapped inside another group of  linked smart objects and everyone  being chained to others for sync transforms  altogether  making Photoshop  slow as hell but same goes to SD as well  .   

In the end you can always ditch this non-destructive monstrosity. Rasterize what you need and just use decades old technique of using clone or patch tool on one layer (saved  in "action") and then play same action on another layer.  This doesn't work with content aware fill unfortunately  

All that said I only did it with color and depth , never roughness or normal channel since those are easily derivable form height itself .

Also forget about layer masks in PS. It's outdated concept.

Use group clipping instead  having smart object inside clipping group together with "Blend if" dialog. That way you could have non-destructive mask and re use it in any other level