is 'texture painting' going to be rendered obsolete in the next while?
polycounter lvl 12
I was just going over some presentation of a new material/shader approach from RAD studios, where they were talking about masked/composite materials.
With the introduction of UE4, it looks EPIC are tailoring towards a very similar thing. Couple this with the introduction of 3d scanning, and software like dDo, and it seems like 'texture artist' is basically going to be a question of rendering out simple masks and then composting with pre-made materials.
Just wondering if, as someone who wanted to be a texture artist, I should be concerned - it seems like this kind of work can be 100% outsourced now.
With the introduction of UE4, it looks EPIC are tailoring towards a very similar thing. Couple this with the introduction of 3d scanning, and software like dDo, and it seems like 'texture artist' is basically going to be a question of rendering out simple masks and then composting with pre-made materials.
Just wondering if, as someone who wanted to be a texture artist, I should be concerned - it seems like this kind of work can be 100% outsourced now.
Replies
I don't think you need to worry about not being able to find a job in that field so much as you need to learn new workflows and adapt to the times or find companies that stick with previous methods.
Everything can be outsourced...
@ SuperFranky Yeah, I guess I meant like..even more outsourced haha.
That being said I fully intend to learn all the new tools and techniques and find them pretty cool and exciting, but since my portfolio has dragged on for so long, I was afraid that by the time it's finished the associated technology and practices will be so different as to render all the work I did basically worthless.
look at blizzard's and riot's success, stylized art is here to stay, it is part of video game culture and we will always need different art styles in games.
photorealism is a great achievement but giving it some style can make it more interesting and can make things simpler to figure out for gameplay.
take a photo and a painting...
it is a matter of taste what you prefer but sometimes paintings make it easier to put the emphasis a specific part of the composition
I guess a better way to phrase things would be:
In the coming generation(s) of game development, is the position of 'texture artist' as we know it going to be rendered obsolete by advances in automation of the texturing process as well the prevalence of pre-created/pre-scanned physically accurate mats which can basically be dragged and dropped onto a model?
Most definitely not.
Programs like this are meant to be used to give artists a head start in texturing (60-75% of the way there or so) with the remaining 25% of polish being left to the artists to do in more traditional means. The biggest mistake that an artist can make is running an asset through such programs and calling it done. That why many assets from inexperienced artists end up looking the same.
That last percent of polish is what make a good asset great and such things cant really be automated.
And for sure you are more likely to get a job (or keep your current one) if you can texture without such programs because you are a more versatile artist as a whole.
You still need to make the base textures and believe it or not outsourcing does a horrible job at this idea of base textures. Teaching them to do this is like asking a mechanic to be a dentist. You end up getting junk back.... very basic stuff that just does not work well. This is of course a learning process for them and eventually outsourcing companies will learn.
And when you start to deal with a specific style this breaks even more.
I have worked in two AAA companies that have a texture Artist positions. The previous ones that did not were considering and I bet have moved to having dedicated texture artists. The sheer amount of stuff to texture in games can not be handled exclusively by one environment artist anymore and get great results... always exceptions of course.
DDO or Substance in essence are the same things we did in photoshop... automation is good and should not be scary but who gets the automation look dev.... Artists... in this case texture artist.
Also remember the texture artist position means more than just painting textures... usually in AAA titles it means a Zbrush sculptor, Shader/Material, and Baking experts. That cannot be automated...
edit:///
In the past I use to be the one guy for a level to make everything, now I would find it extremely difficult of a task... Things change so learn and keep moving forward is my best advice.
I started as a Level Designer than went into Environment Art, and now I am a Texture Artist. And you know what the fact that I went through these other positions makes me a more relevant employee to hire or keep, I am able to reference older experiences. Nothing is wasted knowledge.
As someone who works for an outsourcing company, this comment makes me sad.
Also, I haven't played with substance painter, but "stiff and procedural" is how I would describe the results I've seen come out of dDo as far as realistic stuff goes. At least when it's used for anything more than just laying down a base. (edit: I don't mean to downplay the usability of it as a tool, just from what I've seen too many people seem to wanna use JUST dDo without adding any other texture information to it, so shit ends up looking ....well like it was made in dDo)
Yeah you're going to see some people just use the presets and call it a day, but the real power is giving us more time to create and fine-tune our own textures and materials.
True that comment was a bit over the top I am sorry. But again from my experience outsourcing studios seem a few months or years behind some AAA companies when it comes to workflows. It is going to be a process, but I am sure that with time this will become second nature to anyone in the game industry. Working in a AAA company I deal with outsourcing daily. It is a mixed bag of good and bad stuff. The better stuff are results of better communication between vendor and artists. Again outsourcing is needed but I do not think outsourcing will ever replace texture artist or environment artists. The job is different. We are more concentrated and focused on making an experience happen in the game while outsourcing only makes that one asset as best as possible with the time given. The mindsets are different. While I am thinking of a base material list I am thinking that these materials need to be of a certain style, this is almost impossible to translate to vendors and that is why it is a hard concept to grasp... making base textures are very important since those base materials will impact the whole games look in some way. This is also a general comment on outsourcing this was not directed at anyone. I am sorry the previous comment was so harsh.
Count Vader: I agree a lot of people just use substance and ddo and expect it to just get an amazing result without actually tweaking and having that artists eye on things.
Justin Meisse: I use substance designer with mostly organic stuff and get good to great results. But the tool does not make the art the artist does.
We have tried out 3d scanning a few days ago and, honestly, this is the future for realistic games.(movies are doing the same thing for years...) you get a perfect normal and a high quality color texture. no way to do recreate this quality manually.
but: for stylized content we still need the real artists...
But again, this isn't about all the properly done and beautiful games, or anything posted for example here in Pimping. It's just that it wasn't common to see such rush jobs in CG animation or VFX stuff, whereas we all know there are a lot of games with tight budgets or beginner artists; and we've seen quite a lot of portfolios from such guys.
The point is, textures in particular really need an artistic eye and I don't think that could ever be completely replaced by tools or computers. Same goes for nice charismatic face sculpts, for example.
Er, movies mostly do this for digital doubles only. Full CG people are only used where there's no living actor, like in Benjamin Button or Avatar or Gollum or the Hulk, so there it's still a necessity to have good sculptors and texture painters.
Granted, the Avatars and Hulk were heavily based on scans of the actors but it still required superbly talented artists to create the CG characters.
I imagine that we're going to start moving closer to a prop designers and industrial design type workflows in the near future (atleast for AAA type work). I actually look forward to spending less time creating a convincing wood texture and more time considering what parts should be made of wood to make the overall composition better.
Imo, if something exists in reality then scan it. As an artist my interest has always been in creating something that doesn't exist rather then things that already exist, so it doesn't bother me. The industry will always need talented people with an artistic eye.
Eventually I believe we will get to a point where we are only painting a diffuse map and everything else will be controlled procedurally or via the displacement map.
So yeah, fear of new things is not the best response ... rather, try and embrace new technologies and see how they can make your work easier and better!
Removing AO/cavity from the albedo have also forced me to see contrast in terms of colour rather than light/shadow. Overall, I quite like the PBR approach (and i still texture entirely in PS so it still feels faily traditional).
Nonetheless, I should really try dDo someday, getting that base wear and tear on things such as metallic edges would be a massive timesaver..
Thought the same way about being "replaced" or situations seeming as if that is the goal, but i don't see how anyone can automate creativity as a whole so like others have said you need people for the "styling" part of the texturing process.
Unless the A.i. of the future like in i-Robot / I-phone(uh ohs) actually do create a better image than a human ever could, but we need not worry we would be gone by then but the future people/artist might not be so lucky.
(I took it a step further sure and added the rest of the processes into this equation, still on topic though.)
^There are all interesting insights. I'm still trying to wrap my head around pbr/metalness workflow, I've read over the 'pbr in practice' article on the marmoset site but am still confused with regard to what exactly I'm supposed to be doing differently/what to change from the diff/spec/gloss workflow. However since it looks like UE4 is implementing this too, I definitely have to learn it.
With dDo, the wear/edge scratches it produces seem to be uniform across the whole edge, from what I've seen of people's work. That's like, texturing 101 as far as what you're not supposed to do. But maybe they're just using it wrong?