How do you texture?
polycounter lvl 7
Hey everyone,
Up until today, I put much focus on sculpture (real and digital), and less on painting and texturing. When it comes to the technical part, I know how to texture, and done it a lot. UVs and software stuff, using ZBrush or traditional painting on UV snapshots, etc. Artistically though, I didn't put much effort, since I had other things in my mind. I would use mainly real life photos, or pretty basic painting on snapshots or in ZBrush.
Now though, I'm starting to focus on improving my texturing ability, and would like to hear as many different approaches to texturing, as many of you here have such amazing results I wish I could have myself.
So I'd love to hear, how do you texture?
Do you paint it all, or use photos?
Do you paint on the UV snapshot, or in ZBrush/Bodypaint/Mari?
Do you do it on the high poly, or on the low poly?
Do you use sculpting to get cavity maps to use for things such as fabric textures and skin textures?
Anything that could help me get my hands on a few neat techniques, and a proper workflow, would be really appreciated and helpful for me
I'm more into painting textures myself by the way, and would love to hear methods on creating highly detailed textures that way.
Thanks all!
Up until today, I put much focus on sculpture (real and digital), and less on painting and texturing. When it comes to the technical part, I know how to texture, and done it a lot. UVs and software stuff, using ZBrush or traditional painting on UV snapshots, etc. Artistically though, I didn't put much effort, since I had other things in my mind. I would use mainly real life photos, or pretty basic painting on snapshots or in ZBrush.
Now though, I'm starting to focus on improving my texturing ability, and would like to hear as many different approaches to texturing, as many of you here have such amazing results I wish I could have myself.
So I'd love to hear, how do you texture?
Do you paint it all, or use photos?
Do you paint on the UV snapshot, or in ZBrush/Bodypaint/Mari?
Do you do it on the high poly, or on the low poly?
Do you use sculpting to get cavity maps to use for things such as fabric textures and skin textures?
Anything that could help me get my hands on a few neat techniques, and a proper workflow, would be really appreciated and helpful for me
I'm more into painting textures myself by the way, and would love to hear methods on creating highly detailed textures that way.
Thanks all!
Replies
http://wiki.polycount.com/TexturingTutorials
Also, this is in the wrong section.
Either way - thanks for the link, but I read the wiki often... what I'm looking for is really, some personal tips from fellow artists, about workflow and such, nothing so broad as a step by step tutorial. Although tutorials are awesome, and there ARE some I didn't read in the wiki, so thanks for the reminder.
Post some work and progress and just let the community help you out!
"You'd actually be surprised at how this layer upon layer upon layer of random brushes can end up mimicing just about any damned material you can possibly think of and look remarkably photorealistic without just slapping a photo down."
I think, if you haven't seen this thread already, you could find a lot of the information in here pretty helpful! [:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=87907&highlight=rubi+malone
Now I've become obsessed with finding out how to get these hair strands to be well placed.
Well, here's how not to texture.
I know many people work like that, so I can't say if you're serious or not :P
I know I'd love a good way to paint over my model. The high-poly one that is. I've been looking at getting Mari, but I'm not sure.
Your website's in my favs too. I hope you do international jobs
Any help is greatly appreciated.
The original idea of textures. I HATE painted textures (in most cases). Some textures you look at and can tell 100% sure they are not from photo because they don't look right at all. I think a lot of hand painted ones can come out just fine, but I don't know if they take a lot longer or not. I always use photos. A photo of a 2D surface is exactly the uv projection of something in real world. So why would you not use something that is real. You cant get more real than real.
Of course if real is the style you are going for.
Because any picture you take will take lighting and reflection info with it. So unless you spend lots of time painting those thing out you'll have highlights/reflections of the environment the picture was taken in. Sure photos are an awesome tool and shouldn't be ignored if they do the job right. But you can't just expect simply dropping a picture onto your model to be enough.
Also, if you were to model (for example) a crocodile and you'd sculpt in the scales for your normal map, then it would be impossible to find a picture that would perfectly fit the normal map. So either you'd spend tons of time using the liquify tool and other tools to adjust the texture to your normal map/model or you could just hand paint the texture.
You don't have to always paint everything, using photo sources is smart to safe time, but never only rely on photos to do the job for you, they contain fake lighting information that can make it look more unrealistic than a hand painted texture will.
Not solution to all problems.. but solves most of them.
Here are two examples:
http://vimeo.com/17231029
http://vimeo.com/5820395
So far I've found 3DCoat to be the best one at this. It can project into a viewport grab, but can also send the flat texture to Photoshop as well. And it keeps all your layers and blending modes so you don't need to merge everything into one layer like with zBrush. It makes the workflow a lot less destructive. I believe Mudbox has the same features, but it runs like ass on my machine so I haven't been able to use it extensively. From what I tried 3DCoat seems to handle seams, mirroring and overlapping a lot better though. And its built in panting tools are much better.
I think the thing i like about it most is that it's all vertex colour based, so once you do your game rez retopo you can bake it out along side all the other maps it'll come out perfectly seamless with xnormal. Of course polypaint has its limitations and the output usually needs some photoshop love before the texture is 100%, but i think this can be said of any method really.
I only use it for organic things though, for other materials like metal or wood i stick pretty much exclusively to photoshop and photosourcing.