Photosourcing texturing tips.
polycounter lvl 11
Let's say we were making a photorealistic type of game...
I was wondering if anybody had some good tips or tutorials when it comes to photosourcing textures? For example, reducing noise by using what kinds of filters, level adjustments, and other types of things that a lot of people might overlook/ should be helpful know.
I was wondering if anybody had some good tips or tutorials when it comes to photosourcing textures? For example, reducing noise by using what kinds of filters, level adjustments, and other types of things that a lot of people might overlook/ should be helpful know.
Replies
http://www.cgtextures.com/content.php?action=tutorials
Make sure you don't overdo it it, and only add the photosourced material where its needed (ie, dont slap rust on an entire model, just on the areas where it would rust).
I usually like to have a decent AO bake (if its not tiling), then hand painted base colors, some photosourcing for smaller details, then a little bit of hand painted detail.
I was also wondering if anybody has a tutorials/tips on how to remove noise from a photosourced texture normal map (other than hand painting out the noise)?
For example, I ran a concrete texture through NDO2 and the normal map is really noisy no matter what preset I use.
IMO watch the hard surface texturing by AlecMoody on 3dMotive and the next-gen texturing techniques on Eat3d. Those have really been amazing pieces of advice for texturing. Also Racer made a good tutorial on texturing for NextGen HardSurface but its down. If anyone has the article (I have the video and can upload if someone wants it), mind re-uploading?
Some advice though:
-Learn the blend modes. Basicly there are five categories (in Photoshop): a lighten group, a darken group, a contrast group, a math group and a HSB group - in that order. All blend modes can be useful - even Hard Mix which some ppl have a hard time understanding (lower the fill slider to 10% and you will see "proper effects of Hard Mix).
-Work non-destructive. Don't use the eraser: mask your textures instead. Don't paint highlights and shadows with a brush or with dodge/burn tool: use grey colors and screen/linear dodge (add) or multiply/linear burn (or other lighten/darken blend modes) on a new layer and paint on that.
-Work iterative. You want to sharpen a big area? Save the original, flatten a copy, convert to smart object and use your filter. The good thing about smart objects is also that you can tweak the filter later on, changing opacity and even the blend mode!!!
-Post-process every photosourced texture. Copy+pasting and praying it will look good is sloppy, if not stupid. Use levels, curves, hue/sat and other adjustment layers to tweak your photosourced texture to be exactly like you want.
-Use layer comps for "storing" layer visibility setups.
-Lowering the fill slider to 0% on a layer hides all the stuff you paint on it - but it does NOT hide layer effects. This is very good for say, applying a texture to some area which you might wanna change later on. Instead of using the dumb bucket on a layer (which is permanent - destructive) you can just paint grey on a layer, change the fill slider to 0% and add a "pattern" layer effect.
-Don't use under- and/or overexposed photos unless you know how to fix them.
...I can go on and on but I'm hungry and need to eat -_-
Anybody have tips on creating good photosourced normal maps? (reducing noise, increasing noise etc, making a grayscale image etc)
Always add at least one different texture to your photo-source normal maps. This adds detail that is not showing up in the diffuse channel and increases the quality of your texture 100 per cent. After a while you will amass a collection of images that are no good for anything other than this. Extreme close ups of things that wouldn't possibly be useful for a diffuse channel but have interesting textures and work well as normal map enhancement. Always keep that effect in mind when you're browsing imageafter/mayang etc...
Also set up a greeble library. The things that come up over and over, bolts, nuts, threads, vents, et al
Thanks for the tips. BTW, could you give an example of a normal map enhancement texture?
http://imageafter.com/image.php?image=b17poows056.jpg
I don't personally think it would work for much but I really like the cracks. So I make it tieleable and then use it to add crack detail to an image that doesn't have cracks. This makes shadows on the model where there are no shadows in the texture which increases believability.
So here are the examples. The first is the diffuse texture that I like, the second is a normal map generated from the diffuse texture and the third has an added overlay of a normal I generated from that image I linked to which should be last in the attachment list. HUGE difference.