[WIP] PBR maps generator (C&C, please!) (Free DEMO!)

miguel1900

Hi all!

 It's my first time writing here. As an UE4 developer I have read you a lot of times but, now, when I think I making something important (for me, at least), it's time to come to an important and always useful community.

 I have been working on a PBR maps generator, based on a loaded color texture, and inspired by others which nowadays are a little old, expensive, buggy, or limited in some ways. (Before disappointing someone, I would want to clarify that the plan is selling it at Steam, itch.io, etc, at an affordable price, due to the hard work. Thank you for understanding).

 

With this tool, based on Unreal Engine 4, you can easy and fastly create PBR maps withing some minutes or even seconds, tweaking a few parameters to get tons of different adjustments. All in one place, all with fast previewing results, and all shown inside Unreal. So, if you are, in addition, an UE4 developer, you will get, using the generated maps, the exact same result you were viewing at the software: "What you see is what you get".

Here you are a video quickly showcasing most of parameters behaviours:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opoqlZd2jAY

If you have any question about any of the parameters or capabilities of the sofware, I will be very glad to reply to you. Of course, in a future, an user's manual will be published too, explaining every setting.

 

Please, I would be very glad receiving your feedback, critics, comments, and ideas. About the software itself, the process of publishing it, or any other related task concerning a full software development, from zero to end.

PS: As an ending question; do you think, with current developed capabilities, it can be an useful tool?

PS: A demo will be released soon. However, if you want to test it "privately" and give me back some feedback (please) before the demo release, I would thank you if you could write your interest in this thread. (The "beta" version will be the same as the Demo one, having a watermark on top of the generated PBR maps, in both cases).

Thank you very much and best regards,

Miguel

gnoop

In my experience this method works only for very limited and rare kind of photos where color info basically match  height info.    So I stopped using  it long ago since crazybump .   Under tangent light angle  such materials instantly reveal its fake nature and gets kind of eye catchy.

Still would be interested if it would be some AI  recognizing the subject and doing it in some 'smart' manner .       Sadly neither  Artomatix  nor Photoshop new AI selection could do it really.     But maybe nobody tried yet  to train such AI for textures.  Maybe cell phone cameras depth info could be helpful for that or something.      Even if such AI would learn to recognize  and just select properly  few subjects: crumbled paint  layers, concrete tiles , wooden planks   for example to feed such masks to SDesigner  I would be super excited.

Better than  what's in Substance Designer way  to reconstruct height   from normal maps captured from different light angle pictures would be also an instant buy incentive.

Obscura

I need to agree with gnoop. There are a bunch of cases where this method falls apart and honestly, its showing on your pictures too. The darker bricks aren't necessarily lower in height irl. So this method isn't used in AAA, rarely in AA, and shouldn't be used for portfolio work.

Is it a standalone software btw, or runs inside ue? if it runs inside UE, id suggest making it standalone so it isn't limited to use inside ue.

miguel1900

Hi,

First of all, thank you for your two replies!

Certainly, it's always better to use "manually" designed textures, if possible, instead of using any kind of "automatic" software.

You are right, as a "wizard" tool, it's not perfect. It analizes darks and lighter zones and, based on them, creates the PBR maps. Certainly, brighter zones doesn't necessarily means to be the higher ones, but they can be inverted too. However, in some textures, there can be dark and white areas mixed independently of their height (as the mentioned bricks texture of the video) but, usually, I think, there is a correspondance (or, at least, in the majority of the "photo" surface) between brightness and height, as whiter areas are the most exposed to light, usually due to be the external points of the photographed surface. (About the bricks, I would say the darker one are damaged, so with less height. But yes, not necessarily).

I would say that, for well defined and neutral-lighting color textures, this kind of tool usually (as previously said, not for 100% of textures) work quite well, bringing a plausible result, in my opinion, even if not perfect, for very very close shoots. I will show some different examples during the next days.

About AI or manually designed textures, it would be a dream, but a much more expensive solution, in terms of time and costs.

PS: as a sincere question, how do you get your PBR maps? And do you usually find lovely textures that doesn't have additional PBR maps?

Oh, it's a standalone tool!

Thank you very much for your feedback and best regards!

gnoop

miguel1900 said:

Husually, I think, there is a correspondance (or, at least, in the majority of the "photo" surface) between brightness and height, as whiter areas are the most exposed to light, usually due to be the external points of the photographed surface. (About the bricks, I would say the darker one are damaged, so with less height.

it's true but the problem is you still have to do manual selection  of things to  process differently  colored areas independently  and make kind of frequency separation to  separate micro from macro height differences.

First thing is impossible imo without human or artificial intellect involvement

and regarding frequency separation I don't know any other way except blur/highpass that creates well known halo effect around details.     It basically spoils  the heights.  

This single  part of the process  working without halo  could  be super helpful.   I once tried to make SD node doing  kind of gazillion iterations of high pass + threshold  to overcome this but never succeeded.

As of PBR maps  my approach currently is getting accurate height/depth map first.   It's a cornerstone of every texture    Sometimes it's photogrammetry  where height is paired by color image.   Sometimes Substance designer  or Zbrush

   Roughness, AO, normal  are just derivative from depth/height.     With a gradient layers/nodes in Photoshop or SD . I am not even bothering to download them when use ready made textures.  Height and color are only things I need really

gnoop

I can say I sometimes prefer to reconstruct height from photo contrary to spending hours of tweaking gradients and noises in SDesigner.    But I need totally different tools than what  Crasybump alike soft offer.   Basically a mix of  convenient selection and posterization tools  to separate image features , some pattern recognizing  from images. 

For example I have never been able to make proper looking , physically driven  cracks pattern in asphalt . It's always kind of noticeable they are  cell/bubble noise born originally.

   A tool that recognize such pattern in a photo and make a kind of   ready to feed into SD binary image  would be very helpful.   Without spending forever  hi-passing it to death. 

 

I see Artomatix is introducing AI selection feature. I have no access right now so don't know how it works but the idea is very right I think

miguel1900

gnoop said:

I can say I sometimes prefer to reconstruct height from photo contrary to spending hours of tweaking gradients and noises in SDesigner.    But I need totally different tools than what  Crasybump alike soft offer.   Basically a mix of  convenient selection and posterization tools  to separate image features , some pattern recognizing  from images. 

For example I have never been able to make proper looking , physically driven  cracks pattern in asphalt . It's always kind of noticeable they are  cell/bubble noise born originally.

   A tool that recognize such pattern in a photo and make a kind of   ready to feed into SD binary image  would be very helpful.   Without spending forever  hi-passing it to death. 

 

I see Artomatix is introducing AI selection feature. I have no access right now so don't know how it works but the idea is very right I think

Hi Gnoop,

Thanks for your reply! You use some terms I even don't understand, not only because English is not my mother tongue, but also for your advanced knowledge of the tech (sorry!). If you would have some time, could you illustrate, in addition, your previous reply, please?

Anyway, I have understood the main things and I would want to ask you about this obtained result. I have searched for 2 cracked asphalt images and got the first two (here you are, so even if you have time, we can "compare" results and rearch about workarounds, always trying to improve my tool as possible: https://www.goodtextures.com/image/20198/cracked-asphalt-3 and https://www.goodtextures.com/image/20194/cracked-asphalt).

Without displacement/tessellation:

With displacement:

Without displacement:With displacement:

About the two height frecuencies, I think it could be more or less possible. Anyway, for understanding and searching a way to research about this things, please (again), could you send me two noticeable textures explaining a little which should be the expected result?

And here you are some of the generated textures. The source texture were a compressed JPG and they may have some kind of quality loss (and only 2048px, to be able to upload them to forum):

To use this heightmap, you would need to use negative displacement values or invert the image:

Thank you very much!

gnoop

Your asphalt results are not that bad actually, But looking on your normal map  I could still bet  with tangent light angle, like sunset   you would see mostly noise  and hardly anything else.   Still it's possible actually to make it better from such kind of photo recreating true depth .   And tools to help  in such recreation would be IMO much more welcomed.    Like something doing  "smart" cracks cells selections, filtering all that random noise.    Something more advanced that Photoshop. 

Sorry I can't share neither screenshots no textures from a project I am working for.  And it's kind of time consuming  for me to find unrelated example.

miguel1900

gnoop said:

Your asphalt results are not that bad actually, But looking on your normal map  I could still bet  with tangent light angle, like sunset   you would see mostly noise  and hardly anything else.   Still it's possible actually to make it better from such kind of photo recreating true depth .   And tools to help  in such recreation would be IMO much more welcomed.    Like something doing  "smart" cracks cells selections, filtering all that random noise.    Something more advanced that Photoshop. 

Sorry I can't share neither screenshots no textures from a project I am working for.  And it's kind of time consuming  for me to find unrelated example.

Hi Gnoop,

Don't worry. I understand you can't show them up.

Thanks again for your opinion! Certainly I pushed the normal intensity to the maximum, to add lot of little details. But they are too much, you are right. I will add an option to modify the sun's elevation, to chek this kind of effect in different situations.

In addition, I will try to release the (watermarked) demo during next week.

Best regards!

miguel1900

Already released the Demo (fully functional, but watermarked) version of my upcoming PBR textures generator tool! Try it today! https://marvizer.itch.io/pbr-textures-generator