Material Tutorials: 8 Step By Step Tutorials and General Tips
polycounter lvl 15
Hi there. I decided to get this out now. I may add a couple of more ones when I have cooled down a bit 
There are at the moment 8 different tutorials on materials and how I define them and some tricks I do on various surface types.
Some of them involves sculpting in Zbrush and some are only Max or even Photoshop only.
So here goes:
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/materials.html
And here are some quick links to the different tutorials (New wood tutorial Aug 29, 2010):
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/woodrough/woodrough.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/metalmatte/metalmatte.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/stonerock/stonerock.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/stonerough/stonerough.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/stonecracked/stonecracked.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/stonemarble/stonemarble.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/stoneconcrete/stoneconcrete.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/tilesold/tilesold.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/tilesbricks/tilesbricks.html
Hope you can find some of them useful!
There are at the moment 8 different tutorials on materials and how I define them and some tricks I do on various surface types.
Some of them involves sculpting in Zbrush and some are only Max or even Photoshop only.
So here goes:
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/materials.html
And here are some quick links to the different tutorials (New wood tutorial Aug 29, 2010):
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/woodrough/woodrough.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/metalmatte/metalmatte.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/stonerock/stonerock.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/stonerough/stonerough.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/stonecracked/stonecracked.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/stonemarble/stonemarble.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/stoneconcrete/stoneconcrete.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/tilesold/tilesold.html
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/tilesbricks/tilesbricks.html
Hope you can find some of them useful!
Replies
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/modular_sets/modular_sets.html
And,
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/modular_rocks/modular_rocks.html
Although, I think you're lacking a tutorial on Wood. :P
Oh btw.. I just noticed I posted this in "Pimping and Preview"... Maybe tutorials doesn't really belong there... I think I posted previous ones in the Tech Discussion... Sorry about that if it's supposed to go somewhere else
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironment#Environment_Workflow_.26_Modularity
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironment#Environment_Texturing
Works really great on stained glass/leaded windows and even skyscrapers, as you pass the object the reflections look luch more natural than if all the panels are coplanar.
Good solid workflow - I'm admiring your diligence too - there's a lot of stuff there!
I forgot to say but each tutorial includes a .PSD with all the layers and stuff at the end of the tutorial.
Thanks for sharing!
How would someone make this tile-able?
Thanks for posting
Some methods here.
http://wiki.polycount.com/DigitalSculpting#Tiled_Sculpting
Thanks!
And thanks a lot for that! it is indeed pretty hard to get stuff out to people who may not hang around on the forums too much, so thanks a lot much appreciated
Also, I kind of regret that I didn't make everything tilable in the tutorials... Thanks Eric for posting those tuts, I should probably link to that in my tutorials. May as well just add an extra step or so in the tutorial explaining that IF it is to be a tiling texture in the end. Otherwise... lots of cloning :P
As Eric said it can be very useful to have a picture of a cliff to look at every now and then and see what kind of shapes you can use for your sculpt.
Anyhow, keep up the work, I really like the layers you have in the first pic!
I have one question however, I notice that in the layers of detail in your normals set that the blue channels are neutral, can you explain the process there?
http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap#Blending_Normal_Maps_Together
Ianucci, yes there are several ways to do this, and that's a great link Eric provided.
Usually, I don't mind overlays without too much depth much and I simply skip the blue channel info on those (making it 50% gray bucket fill). But this is really up to how picky you want to be and how the engine you're working with handles it. But personally I go with what looks good ingame even if it sometimes is slightly or even sometimes pretty much incorrect mathematically.
But yeah, if you want a more accurate result you can do like this as well:
- Make one copy of the normal map you want to "Overlay" - fill the blue channel with 50% gray color - set the layer to "Overlay"
- Make another copy of that original "Overlay" layer - fill the red & green channels with 100% white color - set the layer to "Multiply".
These two layers combined will make the result more accurate as you will get the depth information correct right away.
If you overlay something without depth information and then normalize the end result you will get an OK depth result (blue channel that is) but it won't be the same as if you would have if you did the above steps. You could make an action that does the above steps as well. But I simply think for most part that the details I want to use Overlay on I will get an enough accurate result by gray bucketfilling the blue channel and normalize the end result.
Anyway, this is my opinion, and you'd probably be amazed by some normal maps I made are VERY weird and mathematically incorrect, but they do the job better ingame than something correctly made would have done. So my main philosophy is "Ingame result > "correct" result".
Anyway, it's again, great read on that tutorial, and if you feel you want to use another method that is more accurate generally that is of course a good thing
I simply never really had any larger problems yet working the way I do, but that may also be partly because really vast differences in normals I usually mask out and use "normal" blending mode on.. then you never have to deal with this
Hope that explains my choices somewhat and that you get the idea of how I think about this.
Or if you like you can get it here:
http://philipk.net/tutorials/materials/PhilipsActions.atn
The action package file contains these actions:
- Normal map overlay fix with the blue channel preserved
- Normal map overlay fix with the blue channel killed
- Flatten to new layer
- Normalize
- Sharpen
There are two different normal map overlay actions, the one where the blue channel of the normal map is preserved gives you the most correct result mathematically, however it is a bit harder to work with since it requires two layers with different blending modes. I only use this for normal map overlay layers that have a lot of depth in them, and I usually even just mask out such details and use the "Normal" blending mode instead.
The other one kills the blue channel (50% gray bucket fill), this is no problem to use on subtle normal map overlay layers as they hardly contain any visible blue channel information anyway, and these are the details you usually want to overlay anyhow.
One thing I noticed is each page seems to be lacking navigation links, to get back to the "parent" page. Would be nice to have.
And great idea Eric, added "back" buttons on the tutorials now, thanks.
I just wanted to let you know I added a chapter on creating tilable materials in Zbrush. I go into some other techniques as well. If you're interested in that I added that section to the "Cliff" tutorial:
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/stonerock/stonerock.html
thank you so much!
Wanted to ask a question though, how are you presenting the assets? Is it in max with some shader / UDK etc.? The spec/gloss really pops in some of your shots (like this one), and using Xoliuls shader can never really get it to look quite like that .
About that particular shot it is from the Natural Selection 2 model viewer actually
I'm sorry for digging this up again, but I just wanted to say that I finally made another tutorial.
This time it's on some rough wood (using Zbrush some) and I think it will be a bit of a useful read if you want to go with some more stylized handpainted stuff as well (split up the tutorial a bit so some parts I go into some on handpainting details in PS).
All that is included in the .PSD at the bottom of the tutorial as well.
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/woodrough/woodrough.html
Hope it's useful!
I've always wondered how wood specular maps should look, I always kind of wing them (yes I know, really bad!), would be great if you had a little info why you did yours the way you did!
I will try and add some more info on the specular part, snow. Thanks for the feedback