What is your texture workflow now?
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.
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
I did substance, I love it , but my PC became really slow and almost freeze my PC when the shader became more complex.....
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.
you dirty tease, there's no texturing in that video! Nice high poly though.
um, yeah
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)
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.
http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/create-smart-objects.html
+1
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
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)
Real time saver in a production environment!
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.
Im not sure about coat, I dont have access to it anymore (was at an earlier studio), and I only painted low poly there.
Polypaint base, bake, hand paint.
Going back and forth to Pshop if needed.
Actually testing to add ddo.
why would that be?
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.
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.
I haven't used Zbrush since I've started using 3dCoat, now that I think of it.
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?
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?
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