Quixel Megascans Cheating Myself?
polycounter lvl 6
Would I be cheating myself by using Quixel Megascans?
Cheating in a sense:
Using/Modifying a premade library of already well-made textures as apposed to finding and gathering your own and modifying them.
To me it feels like using other people's portfolio quality work and modifying it, as apposed to creating your own textures/materials, as well as getting better at sculpting out details. Is this the wrong way to think?
Cheating in a sense:
Using/Modifying a premade library of already well-made textures as apposed to finding and gathering your own and modifying them.
To me it feels like using other people's portfolio quality work and modifying it, as apposed to creating your own textures/materials, as well as getting better at sculpting out details. Is this the wrong way to think?
Replies
On the other hand, cheating is a really silly way to look at it. It's like is using a drill instead of a hammer and nails to put up drywall cheating? There is no cheating in art (unless you're actually stealing someone else's work). Much of what dDo does is simply automating things that most decent texture artists would do anyway.
That being said, from my meager experience, you'll be editing and fixing things anyways to get it to where you want it, so you're most likely not just gonna slap a Megascans on something and call it a day.
Very rarely will something like Megascans, or even something like marvelous Designer, give you EXACTLY what you want.
Do you know of any tutorials about how to make this kind of physically based materials from scratch?
google: pbr gumroad -warez -torrent
Read the forum rules.
Edit: Oh are you suggesting to search for gumroad pbr tutorials without torrents?
LOL
those are minus signs
-warez is the opposite of searching +warez
You are cheating iff (if and only if) you are using someone else's work without their permission.
But 'cheating yourself' is a bit of a different question I suppose. If you're asking questions while working you'll pick a few things up just by looking at scanned content. And then if you make stuff from scratch you'll learn other things. So don't limit yourself to one or another unnecessarily.
Its cheating if you slap megascans stuff on your portfolio work, and then say "look at these sweet materials I made"
It would be a good idea to make sure that when posting folio work, you mention what you worked on and what you didn't. That way there is no confusion. "For this scene I did all of the modeling/composition, and used megascan materials." or something.
That being said, don't let it be a crutch to stop you from making your own materials as well. There are very few positions out there where you will not have to texture to some degree.
Exception might be the scanned 3d Megascan assets but even they can be tweaked to your liking and for instance the scanned rocks come with hipoly meshes and alpha masks so you can "remix" the content in zbrush and ddo.
Megascans will be a big help for small teams and not so talented folks to get out some decent looking environments but as always the more talented artists will be able to push it even further.
It's not the 'cheating' you should worry about, it's the 'not learning something important' you should worry about.
This is an old tutorial, and looking back, much of the texture values do not make sense, but the basic concepts of material setup and observation are still valid: http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/materials
Yes it's nice to have an amazing portfolio boost by software making it easy, but will you be able to achieve the same thing by yourself without software ? If you are then no, it's not cheating, if you can't well your employer will know very soon and you'll probably lose your job. When they employ someone they want to be sure you can achieve the level of your folio on ANY software.
I think one of the biggest things that stops people from starting a new scene, is the relentless amount of work that everything will be. Sculpting everything, using designer, painter, high-polys, rendering maps, creating materials, lighting, etc, etc. The list never ends. Having Megascans to quickly just grab stuff and go makes complete sense. This is literally the way that a game studio works most of the time anyways
if you do something in your sparetime do whatever feel best...
but in production do whatever needs do be done to get a great asset...