Formula of good texture?
polycounter lvl 10
Still learning the process of making good quality textures for games. I would like to know what is your secret of good texturing or at least some necessary things, that you stick to in order to get good texture?
As I understand the pipeline of texture is
- Baking Hi-poly Ambient occlusion on Low-poly model (max,xnormal or so)
- In Photoshop duplicate AO layer and turn them both to multiply mode
- Under AO create base material and start adding scratches, overlays, rusted and leaked metal things and so one
During this process, when I make for example barrel, while adding scratches and some overlays I am losing tiling for model, and in one place it has noticeable seam, how do you handle with that?
Also my texture looks ugly, despite the fact I am using photo-textures, what might be the cause? Maybe I am losing quality when resizing textures or anything else?
For example this texture looks great:
http://www.cgsociety.org/stories/2008_09/texture_top_ten_tips/image01_03.jpg
If you have on your mind some DVD, that helped you get the idea of good texturing, please let me know, I will be extremelly grateful
With all respect
Wozner
As I understand the pipeline of texture is
- Baking Hi-poly Ambient occlusion on Low-poly model (max,xnormal or so)
- In Photoshop duplicate AO layer and turn them both to multiply mode
- Under AO create base material and start adding scratches, overlays, rusted and leaked metal things and so one
During this process, when I make for example barrel, while adding scratches and some overlays I am losing tiling for model, and in one place it has noticeable seam, how do you handle with that?
Also my texture looks ugly, despite the fact I am using photo-textures, what might be the cause? Maybe I am losing quality when resizing textures or anything else?
For example this texture looks great:
http://www.cgsociety.org/stories/2008_09/texture_top_ten_tips/image01_03.jpg
If you have on your mind some DVD, that helped you get the idea of good texturing, please let me know, I will be extremelly grateful
With all respect
Wozner
Replies
FOR PBM, I barelly put AO and remove shading from the texture.
This model you showing has a good lighting and specular, and this is why it look good.
Add some sharpen to your diffuse maybe? Is really hard to say with no sample of your work or what you trying to accomplish.
Wozner: Think about large, medium and small details and where to put it. Localize your details (for example dirt tends to collect in corners, wear and tear is more prevelent around edges etc). Common mistake of beginners is to put too much of everything everywhere and then it just looks like a relatively uniform noisy mess.
Another tip: Instead of just stacking photo layers on top of each other make completely opaque layers with a solid color, add some slight color variation or texture to it with some grundge brushes and then use masks to paint in your details. For that you can actualy make custom brushes from your photo sources (like the leaking rust in your barrel). The advantage of this is that it's completely non destructive. You can always go back in and remove or add something to the layers. And you can play around with blending options to get some interesting effects. Study the psd's in PhilipK's tutorials to get the idea: http://www.philipk.net/tutorials.html
Where did you get your MT2 sky / background?
Would you mind sharing it?
could you please post your highpoly mesh. Your Mesh in Marmoset looks like there is no normalmap at all.
To get your mesh looking correct you would need a specular map to define the highlights of the different parts of the geometry.
I got that from toolbag 2, here it is
https://www.sendspace.com/file/4aiyor
Sorry, I forgot to mention, that I have used specular map also. Her are spec and render and wireframe of hi poly. Also I don't like those waves on my normal, I`ve browsed polycount and found, that it is the reason when low poly has low count of polys.
As far as why your texture looks bad, well, there are a lot of reasons. I think the first of which is a basic misunderstanding of how material properties work. You're worried too much about where your AO map gets applied and not nearly enough about what type of materials you're trying to represent. You need to study various materials and their surface properties and learn what makes each material unique. You can't simply throw photosourced textures on and call it a day.
Here are a couple tutorials that explain the concepts of current generation PBR shaders:
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-theory
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice
Here is an older one based on Toolbag 1 tech, its not pbr, but many of the same concepts of material definition and layering are the same:
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/materials
https://www.sendspace.com/file/0hi11c