Texture Artist and Assets

Maddness

I'm curious. I like environment modeling, but I enjoy texture art more, and I usually get more inquiries about my texturing than my modeling ability.

Are texture artists still common? and also what's the best way to obtain assets, besides modeling them myself?

Ryno

As an environment artist, I need to model, UV, and texture. For a lot of common objects, the modeling takes up maybe 20% of my time, the UVing maybe 20%, and the remaining texturing might be 60%.

Lots of people can model. Not everyone can UV well. Being able to hand paint realistic textures, as well as color correct and salvage poor photosource, you'd be golden.

I'd hire a mediocre modeller with great texture skills over a great modeller with mediocre texture skills for an environment art position.

Rhinokey

a 3 dicked monkey can be taught to model well enough to do most enviroment art. where the real tallent of a enviro artist comes from is his/her ability to uv those in ways to make the most use from as few textures as possible , and then to make those textures to where they look as if god himself reached down from the heaven and painted them himself.

MoP

It's not difficult to model basic environment stuff in low-poly (like Ryno and Rhinokey are saying) - certainly much easier than doing a low-poly humanoid character, but I agree with Per, there are certain types of environment stuff (particularly more recent, highpoly-baked things) which are much more taxing on a modeller, although I think it's still true that texturing makes up the majority of this workflow, although a good highpoly bake with materials can save a lot of time on this.

EarthQuake

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a 3 dicked monkey can be taught to model well enough to do most enviroment art. where the real tallent of a enviro artist comes from is his/her ability to uv those in ways to make the most use from as few textures as possible , and then to make those textures to where they look as if god himself reached down from the heaven and painted them himself.

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Yeah you can teach any retard to do shity enviro art, you can also teach any retard to do shity character art. The difference being shity enviro art passes much more easily as pro work in the industry.

Focus on your modeling and your texturing, as modeling is MUCH MUCH MUCH more important with recent tech than it used to be in the past, if you can't model great highres models for your enviro work you're easily replacable unless you're working on ps2 games or something.

Maddness

great advice, as always. I've been trying the last few days to really improve my modeling ability, I overwhelm myself sometimes though and get confused trying to think 10 steps ahead. I'll get there one day.

Joao Sapiro

"As for lowpoly modeling in current gen ( by that I mean what people still refer to as next-gen for some reason) games, we're not talking about lame boxes anymore. We're talking about highly detail stuff that is in many ways a lot more complicated and have higher demands of accuracy than characters."

per for PRESIDENTE !!!

JKMakowka

Just to join in:
Per you suck, and unless you have a postcount of at least a THOUSAND posts you are not worthy to make comments like those I have been reading from you lately Spam some more!

Oh and on topic: My personal opinion is that in the medium to long term (probably partially next gen already, the true one ) really most texturing will be done procedurally, which still requires quite a lot of skill to do nicely, but just not those painter/pixel skills used for now.

Edit: For people like per there's a link *Clicky Clicky* what can be done with procedural textures already now.

Rob Galanakis

We're a LONG time away from procedural texturing as a replacement for file textures...

JordanW

I doubt it's even a long way, they've been useable forever in offline rendering (movies FX etc) and they still use painted textures.

JKMakowka

Sure, but 1. Next gen is still at least 3-5 years away
and 2. in prerendered films there is no benefit from having small file sizes, but in games there is! Especially if the market moves further into the direction of online distribution platforms like Steam.
See the 96kb kkriger game on just how small those textures can be: http://www.theprodukkt.com/kkrieger
and last but not least (3.) procedural textures provide a way to highly alter the textures during runtime, which should prove to be quite beneficial in interactive games (see the aging bathroom demo in the link in my previous post).
But as I said just my opinion, and I have no power to look into the future

P.S.: @Professor420 just saw your post on the OGRE boards about releasing your models under a CC license! Great stuff and really generous! Nice to see you here on polycount.

Ryno

I have never seen procedural textures look good unless someone spent a hell of a lot of time setting up some kinds of area-specific mask to blend them properly.

Environment art isn't easy. The task of modeling is getting a lot more difficult with current platforms. What's worse, you can't always just do a quicky Z-Brush job like you could for many organic characters.

I recently had to do a mid-sized hotel with hundreds of windows, shutters, window boxes and flowers. The shutters needed normal maps for the slats and hinges, with proper specular as well. It was an old building with some crazy roof angles, whacky detail framing, etc., and the whole thing needed to be mapped with one texture sheet, and it needed to hold up from about 5 meters away. It needed to look like a real-life hotel for which the reference was mediocre at best. (Skewed photos at medium to low resolution). Total pain in ass.

It took a lot of very slick UV work, a ton of modular construction, and a lot of photo/painting texture compositing. It was a hell of a lot of work and took a lot of planning to nail it properly.

It isn't uncommon to have to model larger environmental pieces that creep up into the tens of thousands of polygons. So modelling is getting more time consuming. But in addition to that, all of those polys need to be UVd and multi-textured with diffuse, spec, normal, ambient occlusion, etc. Smart workflow is becoming far more valuable, and the days of a quick hack and slash job are at an end.

Sage

To get a job these days you need to know how to model and texture well. If you are good at texturing, then get good at modeling, simple as that. I hate when people think that procedurals will replace bitmaps or bitmaps are better than procedural textures, and go into that logic. The reality is you need both and you need to learn how to use both to get your work to the next level. It be like saying you never use photos as overlays to enhance your textures and just hand paint everything. This is production work and you need to be fast and smart about what you do, simple as that.

Alex

JKMakowka

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I hate when people think that procedurals will replace bitmaps or bitmaps are better than procedural textures, and go into that logic. The reality is you need both and you need to learn how to use both to get your work to the next level. It be like saying you never use photos as overlays to enhance your textures and just hand paint everything. This is production work and you need to be fast and smart about what you do, simple as that.

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Certainly true for the current workflow, as procedurals can come in quite handy while making bitmaps, but what I was actually referring to is not to use bitmaps (or raster graphics) as the storage medium at all, but the prodecural textures them selves (and raster images only in memory during runtime).
Thus you can not really mix both in one texture and having a patchwork of (enviromental) textures both prodedural and bitmap based will probably look quite bad as the real benefit of procedurals is the resolution independance (and small storage space).

I don't see procedurals in character textures any time soon though.

Ghostscape

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I hate when people think that procedurals will replace bitmaps or bitmaps are better than procedural textures, and go into that logic. The reality is you need both and you need to learn how to use both to get your work to the next level. It be like saying you never use photos as overlays to enhance your textures and just hand paint everything. This is production work and you need to be fast and smart about what you do, simple as that.

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Certainly true for the current workflow, as procedurals can come in quite handy while making bitmaps, but what I was actually referring to is not to use bitmaps (or raster graphics) as the storage medium at all, but the prodecural textures them selves (and raster images only in memory during runtime).
Thus you can not really mix both in one texture and having a patchwork of (enviromental) textures both prodedural and bitmap based will probably look quite bad as the real benefit of procedurals is the resolution independance (and small storage space).

I don't see procedurals in character textures any time soon though.

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Storage space is really big so shrinking the sizes there isn't really that helpful in most cases (outside of Xbox Live etc) Meanwhile, all of those procedural textures are taking a ton of time to process and put into memory, driving load times up.

kkrieger is a cool tech demo but a shit game. Procedurals have very limited use in game art and the only real benefit of raw procedural images is saving space for downloadable games.

JKMakowka

Once we get to a level where 3 or 4 megapixel textures are common even those blueray disks might be too small, but with procedural textures you can easily render them at any resolution you want.
But even if that is still a long way off or unrealistic because of screen resolution limitation I still think Xbox live or Steam are going to play a much more important role as sales platforms in the future, and thus the need for small size that can be loaded in the background with only minimal initial wait time even on slower connections is going to rise.
And rendering those textures is the perfect application for those unused (or hard to use) dual/quad (or in the case of the PS3 co-) processors.

Kkriger is just that: a techdemo, but stuff like it is shown on the ProFX site, or games released already that use procedural textures (RoboBlitz) show that it is much more feasable than some people say.

Sage

JKMakowka I was refering to people that think using procedural textures is actually just slapping a noise or cloud shader to an object and that the end of it. The reality is use them in layers and combine them with bitmaps to get a final product. Sometimes it's simple sometimes it's huge. Hell your posts mention good use for them.

I'm confused a little by your post though.

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but what I was actually referring to is not to use bitmaps (or raster graphics) as the storage medium at all, but the prodecural textures them selves (and raster images only in memory during runtime).
Thus you can not really mix both in one texture and having a patchwork of (enviromental) textures both prodedural and bitmap based will probably look quite bad as the real benefit of procedurals is the resolution independance (and small storage space).

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It sounds by your post that the textures are being generated at load time like when it's getting baked, is that what you mean? If that's the case why can't the programmer have a shader get baked at runtime that contains both bitmaps in some of it's parameters?

Alex

Richard Kain

A texture artist is somewhat different from an environment or character artists. Character artists are sculptors. Environment artists usually have a lot in common with architects. And good texture artists have a lot in common with painters. Ideally, of course, it would be best to be talented in all three areas. With how much the industry has grown, though, specialization is much more viable these days. If you are really good at texture painting, I'd go ahead and practice at that. I'm pretty confident that you would be able to find a job just doing that. Especially at one of the larger developers/publishers, where they need a high volume of quality content produced.

For my part, I'm not very good at texture painting. I'd hire you myself if I could afford it. It would be great to have someone to paint my models for me.

JKMakowka

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It sounds by your post that the textures are being generated at load time like when it's getting baked, is that what you mean? If that's the case why can't the programmer have a shader get baked at runtime that contains both bitmaps in some of it's parameters?


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http://www.werkkzeug.com/kkoncept/proceduraltextures

Simply put are the types of complete procedural textures I am talking about just a series of mathematical functions that together when executed output a bitmap.
You could in theory add a bitmap into that mix but it would really defeat the purpose of it since then you could just paint it into the bitmap anyways
Ok you could reuse a small bitmap multiple times in one image, that would make sort of sense. But it would still sacrifice part of the beauty that procedural textures are:
1. Extremely small size (just a few bytes of text) and 2. Complete resolution independance (have a slow PC? output 256x256 bitmap during runtime! Have a fricken fast PC? Output 2048x2048 or any size your computer can handle and you really have specific detail in every pixel of that).

Did that make more sense?

Joseph Silverman

But it's always seemed to me they'll still unavoidably look like procedurally generated textures, and therefor fairly poor compared to a skilled artist's work.

Sage

JKMakowka I guess what's throwing me off a bit is why they can't be rendered in real time, without a bake. Do they take too long to render even with the new CPUs? Those textures in that site looked nice, though. I still believe that in the future the polycount will probably be so high that artist will be able to paint directly on the model

Alex

JKMakowka

As the polycount gets higher there is less need for painted detail in the textures and more need for "detail" detail which I think procedural textures exel in, thus SupRore is right: Up until now (or the near future) procedural textures always had a too computerized look because they didn't have enough "painted" detail.
But as polycounts increase and procedural textures (and the tools to create them) get more complex the better they look.

Oh and yes a really well made procedural texture is really too taxing on the cpu to be generated in realtime, or at least you can not generate a few hundred of them the same time in realtime as it would be needed for a game.

But you could certainly only prerender only the first part of the set of algorithms describing the texture and have the rest rendered in realtime to alter them dynamicly, which is what is done in that ProFX demo where the bathroom tiles etc age in speedup *I think*

About directly painting on the model... hmm yes for characters maybe some time in the nearer future... but you realize that even that would probably use a very simplified procedural texture, right?
But I don't see enviromental art to be that high poly anytime soon.

Maddness

hmm. so if I stick with environment modeling I should make sure my modeling is just as good as my texturing, and if I stick to just texturing should I just gather untextured models from other artists or still try to make my own to texture?

Sage

Maddness it's probably easier to learn to model. All you need to do is get reference. Start low and more detail as needed. It's always easier to unwrap your own models anyway in my experience. Do a search for a car you like and model it, then texture it, post it and don't be afraid to screw up since that's how you learn.

Look at whatever you are going to model as shapes. Phone booth a few boxes on top of each other. Car, I start with a box and add edges until I can trace the entire body of the car. Then make the wheels with cylinders. Bevel the edges at the caps so they look more like tires. If it's symmetrical cut it in half then mirror. For now texturing is taking up most of the work.

Alex