What to learn to be a great texture artist.
Hi guys! I want to be a texture artist I really got inspired by video games mostly from the The Last Of Us 2, love how detailed they are so I want to ask you guys which softwares are essential for being a texture artist. I would like to texture a model and create my own texture. I already have knowledge of substance painter and blender, I want know what professionals use for texturing, creating textures or shaders one other thing that I am new to polyCount so If I am doing something wrong or it can be done better please tell me. Thank you.
Replies
Hello, as far as I know, you might wanna check Substance Designer too. I heard it can be used for creating shader and material :).
substance designer doesnt create shaders, it can be used to create textures to drive shaders.
the first thing i would do, check online if someone 3d ripped those models and analyze how they are set up, but also look for talks, naughty dog ofte explained how they did things and how they tackles stuff. if not for TLOU2, definitely for the uncharted games.
blender and substance painter are a good combo, you have everything you need to learn how to make that stuff, i guess it would help knowing what direction of a surfacing/shading artist you would like to become.
as in: characters or environment?
I basically want to become a asset texture artist
and interiors too I will upload some pictures to show you guys what I want to do
study actual material, tools are substance painter, designer, quixel, and more
@Neox Substance Designer can be used to make shaders, MDL for example and there's ongoing work to integrate MaterialX.
To the OP, we have lots of resources to help with understanding how Naughty Dog does their textures:
https://polycount.com/discussion/122359/the-last-of-us-art-dump-rogelio-olguin/p1 Great post from @rogelio, make sure to scroll down to see the texture breakdowns.
Naughty Dog artists are experienced professionals with many years of experience, so it will be difficult to replicate the same level of polish. However you can't have a better teacher than to look at their work!
At the core, they are blending between tiled textures to create rich organic-looking environments. So, learn how to make high quality tiled textures, with sculpting, and with node-based editing. Learn about PBR, so you know what kinds of texture passes to use (albedo, roughness, metalness, ambient occlusion, etc.). Learn about texture blending.
This is a bit too advanced right now, but neat to see examples with breakdowns. This is taking texture blending to an extreme. https://polycount.com/discussion/174377/witcher-3-blood-and-wine-architectural-material/p1
See also the Vertex series of books. It features some artwork and breakdowns from Naughty Dog, like Anthony Vaccaro who did environment art for the Uncharted series. https://ryanhawkins.gumroad.com/
And we have more Naughty Dog game art examples here
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Game_Art_Examples#Uncharted_3_.282011.29
the work on Materialx support for designer is dead - all evidence of the plugin/GitHub have been wiped off the internet (at least as of mid November last year)
I know this because we needed it and it was gone.
MDL support is still there
Best thing you can do in my opinion is practice Substance Painter / Designer, and Id say focus more on designer, because simply it will teach you how to specifically create textures / mats to be used in anything you want.
You just need to reach out to the guy who made the POC. My dept changed priorities so I dropped MaterialX research, but I was close to building a new exporter for Designer. I'll dig up my notes.
That wouldn't hurt at all, thankyou sir
Hi everyone! thank you so much for your help you guys really inspire me to go further.
Thank you, Yes I know I can’t reach there work quality they are really experienced artists but they really inspire me to be like them you really pointed all thing I need to reach my goal thank you.
Thank you so much. Very informative and helpful.