Gamedev - texturing apporach

czapi_99

Hey,

while texturing my last object a question come to my mind. How game studios approach to texturing. I mean, they are using texture libraries like Substance 3D Assets, or they are creating all of the textures, materials etc. from scratch by usage of Sampler (there come next question - are material artists are just walking around in the aim of finding, for example, pavement or wood tiles in purpose to take a photo and use it?) and Designer? Or maybe they're using a mix of it - some of the textures are from libraries, and some are made ownhand?

gnoop

Working  under "Senior material artist"  title in a racing game  I can say I mostly do materials in Substance Designer  from photogrammetry  I shoot myself ,my own  custom nodes and Gaea .    We have Quixel  megascan subscribtion   but I hardly  use theirs  at all to be honest.   Most of  materials  looks repeating as hell  in a racing game . And no Mixer or S painter  tricks would  allow  you to hide  2x2 meters nature  well enough.   Their small objects collections are another story, could be pretty helpful.

Racing games need sort of pixel art quality of materials. When every pixel  matter  so you could use not as tiny texel size as in many  FPS.  It easier  to do when you do it from scratch.    Besides the choice is not that big in those libraries really. Lots of same looking things and never anything specific you actually need.   

  Also I find Sampler  pretty inconvenient and useless.  Did several approaches  then just gave up.

 

 

okidoki

I think the question is what style do you want/have to follow.. and then make the materials in this style..
Maybe that's the problem for some beginners ( not that i'm a pro ).. just using any photos doesn't make up a texture.. nor a material at all..

Also using "any" photo and making all other maps out of it may be not so easy.. expect if someone really know what one is doing  and (al)so knows how to make or get the proper image settings.. 

poopipe

Almost everything we make is done from scratch in designer and either used direct or applied in painter.

The only real exceptions to that are organics like rocks or ground surfaces where we use photosourced textures in conjunction with designer because it's just so much faster than building a convincing material by hand.

sprunghunt

Some games use photos and some games don't. As okidoki says it's very dependent on the style.

On a game like Battlefront they're extremely photo and scan based. They have teams that are flown to a destination to just photo scan the environments.

Games like God of War use some photos - but only to help with the texturing process as masks and so on.

A game like fortnite or league of legends would use almost no photos.

I personally have taken photos for textures. But it has depended on what I'm working on.