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What is your texture workflow now?

polycounter lvl 5
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Fogbrain polycounter lvl 5
With all this new wave of PBR workflows of specular/reflectivity and metalness/albedo workflows and programs like DDO, and Substance Designer and Painter, and we have all this wonderful new fandangled tech like Mari, Zbrush Polypaint, Modo's painting system and the old school Photoshop. We have so many choices!

So what fits you best?
How has been adapting to the PBR workflow in the past couple of months?
What program do you find yourself staying in the most?
Which workflow have you tried that has proven to be the best results?

Me, depending on the task I'm floating between Photoshop/DDo or Substance Designer/Painter and really having a particular workflow inside of either programs is differing constantly.

But if you've got a technique you're willing to share, share it!

Let's see if we can bounce ideas on what works best for you or me.

Replies

  • SuperFranky
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    SuperFranky polycounter lvl 10
    I tried both Photoshop and Substance Designer for PBR and liked Substance quite a bit more. It's a system hog, sure, but it's much easier to work with nods than layers and you can have non-destructive workflow and fast iterations.
  • xvampire
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    xvampire polycounter lvl 14
    I Like photoshop more but re-importing new baked texture to layer is not fun for me :(, I got the automation for exporting textures, but not importing base texture doh

    I did substance, I love it , but my PC became really slow and almost freeze my PC when the shader became more complex.....
  • Rurouni Strife
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    Rurouni Strife polycounter lvl 10
    My general workflow is an adjustment of my older workflow (for now). I keep all my materials layered or grouped in my albedo with only some merging. This way, I can adjust my roughness maps easily in the roughness group on a per material basis. Problem is-MASSIVE FILE SIZE. I'm only doing this for now as I continue to learn and work with Substance and Painter/Mudbox.


    So what fits you best?
    I've been picking up Substance faster than expected, and the non destructive workflow will greatly help me in the future.

    How has been adapting to the PBR workflow in the past couple of months?
    First few assets were rough but lately it's been fantastic. Everything makes a bit more sense now.

    What program do you find yourself staying in the most?
    Photoshop currently, but probably Painter and Substance soon.

    Which workflow have you tried that has proven to be the best results?
    Substance-so far inconclusive as I haven't produced anything final with it. However, I expect I will soon.
  • bugo
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    bugo polycounter lvl 17
    Mine, depending on what it is, is like this: http://vimeo.com/101276067
  • Justin Meisse
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    Justin Meisse polycounter lvl 19
    bugo wrote: »
    Mine, depending on what it is, is like this: http://vimeo.com/101276067

    you dirty tease, there's no texturing in that video! Nice high poly though.
  • bugo
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    bugo polycounter lvl 17
    lol, but it's what I do nowadays for creating a texture, texturing doesnt mean only color, does it? :P
  • Justin Meisse
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    Justin Meisse polycounter lvl 19
    bugo wrote: »
    lol, but it's what I do nowadays for creating a texture, texturing doesnt mean only color, does it? :P

    um, yeah
  • Oniram
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    Oniram polycounter lvl 17
    what ive noticed most in my workflow is im doing WAY less hand painting of dirt and scratches etc for my textures. for the most part what ddo does now is an automated way of how i was working for the past few years, by pretty much making masks on solid color layers using my bakes to get details. i try though not to rely 100% on ddo though since after a while things start to look too similar

    in regards to transitioning to pbr.. that was kind of seamless. truthfully im not noticing a workflow difference when making pbr textures, since its kind of the same thought process as it always was, with a few new rules (which i even sometimes break)
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    Yeah DDO isn't magic or new, it's tiling textures, masks, layers, filters, and channels that make sense in a PBR workflow. If Photoshop was designed for texturing, it would have all of those features integrated into the software. You can always make new base materials for DDO to get some variation from the presets.
  • Ispheria
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    Ispheria polycounter lvl 3
    Substance Designer. I have Painter but I don't use it, mainly cause I want to have a bunch of substances texturing my stuff instead of actual maps to save space.
  • Racer445
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    Racer445 polycounter lvl 12
    pretty much the same, just more automation. lots of photoshop scripts and tons of premade, already adjusted photos i can just drop in.
  • JackNelson
    I paint a base color texture in my sculpting program, including any other details that might fit, and then do pretty much everything in photoshop. No ddo/automation of any kind really, but imo this is kind of a backward way to do things and I have a lot to learn. Artists now would have to be nuts to not take advantage of the great programs/plugins etc out there that can save so much time.
  • rino
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    rino polycounter lvl 12
    mudbox is really nice for projection and switching to ps. not to mention its 10 bucks.

    i'm using mudbox, zbrush and photoshop for texturing. but recently i'm moving more towards premade stuff, really speeds up the process a lot.
  • xvampire
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    xvampire polycounter lvl 14
    ahhh , apparently in new photoshop CC we have to use layer that linked to external image, instead have to reimporting the layers over and over lol

    http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/create-smart-objects.html

    pGBtXqG.png
  • Torch
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    Torch polycounter
    rino wrote: »
    mudbox is really nice for projection and switching to ps. not to mention its 10 bucks.

    i'm using mudbox, zbrush and photoshop for texturing. but recently i'm moving more towards premade stuff, really speeds up the process a lot.

    +1
  • Minos
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    Minos polycounter lvl 16
    When I started doing PBR stuff I was doing everything by hand, but that proved to be very time consuming and the results were not that great.

    These days I use DDO to get a good base down and then hand paint details on top to get a more unique style. This works pretty well because DDO provides good high frequency noise, which makes a BIG difference compared to old school texturing methods where most of times I was just using big photos with no small scale definition.

    Depending on the kind of game you are working on material definition, blend masks and lighting play a much larger role than beautiful looking textures like in the past :)
  • Neox
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    Neox godlike master sticky
    stylized stuff is usually polypaint + bakes + structures, really besides some fixing we pretty much dropped painting in photoshop or 3dcoat. polypaint kicks the but out of anything speedwise. the automasking is something i couldn't find in any other tool yet (mudbox drybrush doesn't behave the same and i didn't test mari)
  • Spoon
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    Spoon polycounter lvl 11
    What is mudbox doing differently than say, coat?
    Neox wrote: »
    stylized stuff is usually polypaint + bakes + structures, really besides some fixing we pretty much dropped painting in photoshop or 3dcoat. polypaint kicks the but out of anything speedwise. the automasking is something i couldn't find in any other tool yet (mudbox drybrush doesn't behave the same and i didn't test mari)


    Im really interested in this. Do you have time to elaborate how you are going about that? I usually used coat with the "more in cavities" option,for example. What makes PP so much faster than alternatives? Is it just because I havent mastered the masking options yet? Any recommendations on what to use to get the base down with them? Seems AO is insanely slow on my PC, and the others arent always super solid, or creates a super sharp mask, etc. I basically just have trouble with it.
    (Im doing env, not chars, btw)
  • Joost
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    Joost polycount sponsor
    What I love about DDO is that you can create your textures, plug in different source maps and quickly get awesome results. I find that if you have a good base normal map even the default presets can look really cool. Though I would obviously recommend heavy tweaking and creating custom presets.

    Real time saver in a production environment!
  • Neox
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    Neox godlike master sticky
    Spoon wrote: »
    What is mudbox doing differently than say, coat?




    Im really interested in this. Do you have time to elaborate how you are going about that? I usually used coat with the "more in cavities" option,for example. What makes PP so much faster than alternatives? Is it just because I havent mastered the masking options yet? Any recommendations on what to use to get the base down with them? Seems AO is insanely slow on my PC, and the others arent always super solid, or creates a super sharp mask, etc. I basically just have trouble with it.
    (Im doing env, not chars, btw)

    i mean the brush automasking option not the mask by something options. cavity and backface masking are awesome.I have to try it in 3dcoat. can you paint the highpoly without uvs or will it need uvs? i really didn#t paint there in a long while.
  • Spoon
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    Spoon polycounter lvl 11
    woa, didnt know about that, this is awesome! Thanks!

    Im not sure about coat, I dont have access to it anymore (was at an earlier studio), and I only painted low poly there.
  • FelixL
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    FelixL polycounter lvl 9
  • Carlosan
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    Carlosan polycounter lvl 10
    i'm using 3dcoat for texturing.
    Polypaint base, bake, hand paint.
    Going back and forth to Pshop if needed.
    Actually testing to add ddo.
  • Fwap
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    Fwap polycounter lvl 13
    Would you guys say that the use of source textures like ones from Cgtextures are somewhat redundant now?
  • Neox
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    Neox godlike master sticky
    Fwap wrote: »
    Would you guys say that the use of source textures like ones from Cgtextures are somewhat redundant now?

    why would that be?
  • Fogbrain
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    Fogbrain polycounter lvl 5
    Fwap wrote: »
    Would you guys say that the use of source textures like ones from Cgtextures are somewhat redundant now?

    Kind of I'd say, especially since many of these textures have lighting/shadow information in them and you'd have to extract that manually in photoshop and even then it'd look half as good as megascans for example.
  • moose
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    moose polycount sponsor
    Process is mostly the same, depending on the asset.

    PBR: realistic

    If you don't have a library already, defining your surfaces breakouts and definition is the most important step to do early. I like to add solid colors to sections around the mesh (usually from an object-color bake, and make masks in PS for groups) to define local color, then move to surface type: Metal/Non Metal, and finally get an approximate Roughness set on each surface based on what you want it to be. Doing this first will ensure that you're not over-detailing stuff, or inform yourself if the design is working or not. This work should be done quick, you should be able to do this stuff in a matter of hours (especially if you're using ddo). Getting a good base established will make the rest of the texture easy.

    After I feel good about this, its just a matter of working each material and adjacent materials with color texture, and "character layers" of wear, tear, age, history, story. I like to pick something I'm excited about first that has minimal large-open areas to get warmed up - an engine piece, some pipes, detailed designy area, and then hop around from there to an area that will make a large impact. I also like to hit the adjacent materials as I work to make sure that each material not only is unique and separate, but also so they relate to one another. As a final pass I do detailing like final decals, forced contrast in color/rough where needed, edge callouts for attention, lights, etc. Once i do this, I generally end up going back in adjusting areas to make them fit in and be done.

    The biggest change for this process, its that most of the work is done in a vacuum, as a mask. I rely heavily on auto-reimporting textures and scripts to save masks so previewing on the asset in engine with the appropriate shader is fast and easy. I don't want to waste time clicking, so try to minimize the time from saving the texture to previewing is near-isntant. This is one of the largest changes that took a while to get used to, that you're no longer looking at a texture in Photoshop to gauge its quality, you must look at the final result in the shader to know the final result. Your engine becomes your Photoshop, even moreso than prior generations.

    For non realistic:

    Ill use lots of bakes to start - AO, Cavity, Gradient, BentNormal, object-bakes to create a base shade map, and then follow the same process as above.

    I use 3dCoat a lot to paint masks and do base color detail, and will occasionally use Zbrush's zapplink to do some things. 3dCoat is faster and better for painting, but crashes often. Zbrush takes a little more time to setup and you get artifacts, but is reliably stable. Most of the time I'd say im 60% photoshop 40% "other."

    Processes may change from tech-jump to tech-jump, but texturing is not about how its done, its the age, history, story, and character you put into the texture that counts! I like some of the automatic pipelines for creating textures, but I don't feel they really capture the same character and story you can get by doing it by hand.
  • Justin Meisse
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    Justin Meisse polycounter lvl 19
    Moose: What version of 3DCoat are you using? I've worked with it's painting features pretty extensively for a few years and I've found it more stable then my dabblings in Zbrush. I was using v3.x and later v4.
  • moose
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    moose polycount sponsor
    Am using V4. The stability issues I have are always during import and mesh setup, never during painting. Not sure why, but occasionally I just cannot import a mesh and have to do some stupid Max-Dance to get it to work.

    I haven't used Zbrush since I've started using 3dCoat, now that I think of it. :)
  • weee
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    weee polycounter lvl 3
    whats the best tool (around $500) for texture painting (both low and high poly, mainly for organic stuff but also hardsurface and others)? i have ZBrush, can't afford Mari.
  • Fwap
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    Fwap polycounter lvl 13
    Neox wrote: »
    why would that be?

    Basically what Fogbrain was saying, also even if you manage to get all the lighting information out of the photo, its still not a true Albedo color, right?
  • moose
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    moose polycount sponsor
    weee wrote: »
    whats the best tool (around $500) for texture painting (both low and high poly, mainly for organic stuff but also hardsurface and others)? i have ZBrush, can't afford Mari.

    3dCoat is $99.99, highly recommend.
  • weee
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    weee polycounter lvl 3
    moose wrote: »
    3dCoat is $99.99, highly recommend.

    how about comparing to Substance Painter? anyone has tried both, i suppose you have to pair with Substance Designer?
  • leleuxart
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    leleuxart polycounter lvl 12
    I've been enjoying DDO a lot lately. I've tried Substance Painter, but haven't gotten the hang of it yet, at least for using my own materials. I like the idea of automated/masked work in Mari, Substance, DDO, etc. a lot more for PBR. Dealing with multiple layers and masks just gets hectic in Photoshop after awhile.
  • Ispheria
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    Ispheria polycounter lvl 3
    weee wrote: »
    how about comparing to Substance Painter? anyone has tried both, i suppose you have to pair with Substance Designer?

    You don't have to pair it with Substance Designer at all. It certainly doesn't hurt to have them both, but Substance Painter is definitely enough to texture stuff...well, stuff that's going to be using pbr at least. Atm (cause it's still in beta) it doesn't have blinn shaders or anything, but I'm pretty sure they're going to add that stuff
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