Is Photosourcing a bad word?
polycounter lvl 11
Lately I've been hearing artist say, "oh, so and so photosourced that...." Is using a photosourced texture considered cheating in this day in age? If you can make something look awesome in the end, does it really matter how you got there?
Replies
Using photos as source for masks, overlays, etc etc it common practice though. Anything you can do to improve your workflow is fair game, there really isn't much point in hand painting what you can easily generate or grab from a source texture.
Painting every little pixel by hand isn't something people really do anymore. For current gen stuff anyway, for mobile/oldschool super lowpoly stuff that is more common.
Having a texture that used photos can look great, if you do it right.
Broadly speaking, you get a better result for current gen textures by starting with a good Normal map and AO (usually high poly derived) then creating a diffuse to match. This tends to create more subtlety and depth in the normal map and a better match between details of the normal map and diffuse/spec/etc. Photo-sourcing often runs the other way, starting with a photo derived diffuse map that's then run through a normal map generation program. Usually these normal maps aren't as accurate and because they only have the values from photo diffuse to go on and have to sort of best-guess the actual depths represented. Additionally any lighting issues in the photo (strong directional lights or shadows) get read as depth information and rolled into the normal map as inaccurate high and low areas. A really good photo will minimize this, but the same even lighting that makes for a good photo will produce a fairly flat normal map.
Photos can still find a use for adding high frequency noise, or variations to the diffuse map, but their effect should probably be very subtle. And creating normal maps solely from filtered photos is probably asking for trouble.
That's a wall of text and its still scratching the surface of the topic. The best advice I can give is to check out tutorials on creating current-gen materials.
There are some good ones here (a few even use photos in the process):
http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materials/materials.html
I'd imagine folks around PC can recommend a lot more.
Hell, some people don't even have the decency to use CB's 'Remove Highlights/Shadows' feature for the diffuse! Talk about nasty and donwright lazy! I mean I understand you want to get the job done, but not running a couple of filters, as cheap looking as they may be is a new low I have been noticing in some games.
It also doesn't help that many textures are taken from big-name sites like CGTextures, so there is alot of sameness when they're not mixed, and it funny how 'change the color' without respecting cavity detail is considered good job in some places.
It also doesn't help that I see quite a few artists (sadly, some of my friends did this) where it was them ripping out textures from games, and sourcing those, essentially using other peoples work for free.
So yeah, Photo-sourcing it's so much as a bad word, as it people have sullied the name of the game, and while again, getting the job done if the word of the day, there is a large difference on how you got there.
could you explain what you mean by are you talking about changing the hue of a photo to match your desired result and/or other layers in your texture?
if so, would you mind to explain what cavity detail is in this context and what you would do to them when using photo sources?
I'm just curious and would like to learn.
With textures, especially when sourcing them, alot of this detail exists naturally, and simple (let me remove highlights and inverse the effect) can get your some interesting shadow information to play around in your texture, especially if the texture is taken with a cast sky (EI: no hard shadows or highlights) hence requiring you to do it manually without any plugings (EI: ndo2), and avoiding the AO information from there.
And yeah, to a certain extent, to what you mentioned, effectively isolating said layers and using a simple Hue change on the base texture will allow you have greater flexibility, especially if you have to use darker colors which are naturally darker, like a red or blue tint.
It's nothing special if you have ndo2, you can also create a couple of actions like "Hard Cavity", "Soft Cavity", etc as actions in PS if you lack said plugin.
My rant was related on how something that can be so easily automated, and simple, is skipped upon and instead direct textures from CGTex are used instead, it's especially daunting in bigger studios and triple A titles, when they use a sand texture that looks bleached.
I also noticed that photosourcing is massively used in terrain textures and aerial texturing ... I doubt anyone usually does a hand paint job to make terrains and landscapes , of course manual edits are heavy as well but still I think the main body of those kind of textures come directly from photoes ...
you could spend all day trying to copy a photograph by hand for the prestige of being a hand-painter, but you're making about as much sense as a photosourcer trying to do painterly at that stage.
Crysis 2 and Skyrim disagrees with you. As well as Witcher 2, Guild Wars 2, TERA Online, Assassin's Creed 3. Just to mention games I played recently.
All of them have heavly photosourced textures. It will never be noticeable for average player.
The point is that hand-painting texture do not always fit into aesthetics and this is only things that matter. As long as guidelines for look can be kept it's irreverent how you achieved it.
Branches placed over blue background and photographed.
Picture
now some other things where taken from photoes like wood , but then I had manually edited a lot , the sand instead was just noise and lot of handwork with application of a normal map taken from a tiled picture of a blurred sand and so on ...