Texture compositing / mixing materials, best practice?
polycounter
I wonder what's the best solution currently? I mean something like this:
Form what I see in this video it's a perfect workflow. But I'v never tried it in MAri myself. Is there other perfect solution? Sadly I can't find any decent replacement with Adobe or other tools.
I use Substance Designer and it's such a tremendous pain in ass to recreate something like this. It's always a non stop puzzle solving that draining your time . Something is always missed . Some macaroni connection is misplaced or forgotten. Some extra blur and size mismatch or other shit happens that takes ages to figure out . Old material non working properly anymore. etc. If it's other person graph it's a total disaster.
I tried to keep only texture height buildup in SD and move the color gradients and final objects/materials compositing into Photoshop . It works sort of + their recent patter preview + exr-io that allows to read cryptomatte masks from scattering something in actual 3d renderer rather than use that horrible atlas scatter in Substance Designer. Still Photoshop makes you obstacles everywhere with its layer structure and super slow work in 16 bit mode.
Tried Affinity Photo for same reason . it 's much more non-destructive than Photoshop with its layer "links" , erase blending mode, non cloud asset library and ability to pack anything in RGBA channels automatically and much speedier. But lacks of tools, broken displace live filter aka direct warp in SD and general soft stability still makes it a pain.
Tried Substance Painter as a kind of texture compositor on a plane mesh. Also works but inconvenient as hell and also slow.
Tried quixel mixer . Only square textures . A hell of a mess with blending things by depth . unIntuitive as hell either.
So what you do to quickly composite something like that road piece from the video? When you need to re-scale, adapt details of clamped stripe shaped texture to a new width, etc? Any opinion please.