Wonder what people consider most convenient soft to composite tilable textures?
I mean not creating them form scratch , from building height and coloring it but rather compositing alredy done materials? Performing height blend by manual brush input? Actually not only ready materials but rather pieces of photogrammetry scans?
So far I tried Sampler, SPAinter , Photoshop, Affinity photo., Quxel mixer , Substance Designer and just Blender.
it's seems like simple and straight forward task but I found non of them be really convenient and quick/easy to do the task. Sometimes one soft has something nice and cool but terrible otherwise and so each of them.
Sampler kill content aware fill feature and it made it even less suited for the task . Height blend by a brush is a torture. Never exact, never proper. Scattered details are blurry and the soft is inconvenient as hell in general IMO. It's important to be able to re-shuffle and adapt to each other those scanned pieces manually to get a less repeating looks and it's tremendously hard to do in Sampler.
Re-shuffling Is super easy and cool in Photoshop pattern preview but producing a decent height blend between pieces requires so huge and messy stack of smart objects inside smart objects put in clipping groups again inside another smart object I often couldn't figure out a thing in my own files . it's beside switching in between depth , normal ,roughness 'channels' inside 16 bit smart objects that takes forever usually.
Aphoto works so much quicker with such constructs but lacks many important conveniences and layer stack is even more complicated.
SDesigner is spaghetti monster mess , any manual tweak is so inconvenient you can forget about it.
SPainter is ok but working with pieces of photogrammetry scans is super inconvenient . Height blending through anchors is not convenient either . Scaling and moving 'decal' pieces around to re-shuffle the composition is prone to mistakes and super twitchy. No way to scale something precisely around a set center of scaling. Not much better than in SD really.
QMixer doesn't work in non-square format. Height blend by brush works rather puzzling . I spent not that much time with it although.
So any thoughts about the subject. What do you prefer and why? I mean to quickly composite something from already available resources.
Replies
Designer
Because it's exactly what it's for
You probably need to give Designer another chance, it is going to be the most effective tool for the job. Sampler is supposedly designed for precisely what you describe - i've not really played around with it enough to make a judgement, but I suspect it's actually not 'all-that'.
I do agree that Designer can be fiddly when working with whole materials, are you making use of the group node link dragging, alongside exposed parameters and functions? That can go a long way to streamlining a workflow, especially if you build a foundation of helper tools first. This sounds to me like a workflow problem rather than a software problem.
An out-there suggestion would be to give Houdini a go, but it's absolutely not designed for working with textures. Instead you'd be doing your mashing and composition via geometry, which probably won't suit your workflow.
Yeah. Designer is what I actually use last 10 years probably. It still never stops to amaze me how monstrously inconvenient it is for simple tasks. For something that should take couple minutes only. It's like using electronic microscope to read a small print on something you have to program yourself yet to do so.
For task like taking a piece of color/depth pair from reality capture, content-aware fill gaps and sink it a bit into some procedural sand waves in somewhat not ugly repeating way. And when it still repeats like crazy along a road in your game for instance you try to do so in non- square form factor . It's where SD tries to f... you . It's absolutely not tolerant to changing texel size or form factor . You basically have to re-adjust evry noise involved .
Ok , you did it. Now want to make a few very subtle manual touches for height blend to weed out few obviously too repeating chunks that stay ugly whatever seed you gave it . No way , both bitmap and svg nodes are from stone age . It's an absolute torture in SD.
You try to do it in SPainter , waste a few hours trying to figure out weird quirks of why your materials are looking blurry or weird. And still your manual tweaks are not delicate enough because of how height blend is working there. It's like swinging sledge hammer where you need a sable hair brush ( same metaphor describes Sampler even more )
I tried to do a Photoshop comeback last year. It's perfect for delicate touches and built all around the idea of subtle tweaks for both colors and height but gosh , recreating live height blend to be workable in pattern preview takes so huge stack of linked layers and clipping smart objects I couldn't figure out a thing just next day.
Did you have a look at Filter Forge? https://filterforge.com/
There is a free older version available from time to time. And they have regular sales. Like now , with 50% off ...
Tiles . Yes, I use it from time to time. Managed to recreate most of meaningful SD nodes there like Slope blur with its unlimited loops option . I love its "image bombers" . So much easier to use than Substance splatters.
And it's free of that terrible SD limitation of redoing everything after changing form factor . You can scale and stretch material whatever you like in the end of node flow and evry noise is adjusting automatically.
The huge problem it's CPU bound and slow as hell even on my 12 core ryzen. And to make any manual mask touches, any subtle hight blend tweaks you have to use it as Photoshop plugin anyway where it just rasterizes result on a layer flat pixels.
Would it be working as live filters in Affinity photo I will start saving money for 64core AMd cpu but it doesn't unfortunately. 10 or so years ago it worked in that live manner in vector soft Xara. Took ages to recalculate on that time cpu. No more working with Xara at all.
Most meaningful Substance soft is Painter probably . Still I have an issue with it and I broke my head already trying to find a workaround.
How can I make it work same way Pattern Preview works in Photoshop? or freeform transform in Quixel Mixer ? I mean to have this star "decal" appear on opposite page side? I use pattern preview in PS to re-shuffle scans of rocks for example to find less visually repeating version .
I tried to make a special sbsr for that but it comes with no gizmo . just sliders. Painter finally got decent transform gizmo with scaling around an arbitrary placed center of transforms. I've been asking Algorithmic for the feature for decades and it still same old awful way in Designer and Sampler .
Another huge Painter annoyance is absence of actions/scripts. In Photoshop I can just drop color and height images , hit an actioion and a whole "live height blend" stack of layers would appear with color tagged layers , proper naming to find and sort things . rasterized copy of " beneath" tagged for further scripted updates etc. In Painter I have to reset height blend again and again after each sbsr drop.
After Adobe bought Substances I though they would bring conveniences from Photoshop and Illustrator maybe . So far I see only that gizmo feature.