Help with textures and Unreal 4 Material Editor
polycounter lvl 6
Hi all,
So first of all I hope this is the right thread to post the two questions that I have. These questions relate to Environment and Prop Artist work.
Okay so my first question is which website do you all use for your textures to get high quality textures? Is their a website that has high quality texture images, or would CG Textures still be a good website to get textures from?
The second question I have is when I apply the textures to the model in Unreal Engine 4 after making it in Maya. Are there different tutorials on how to get good results for your textures? What I mean is how do you know which nodes to use in the Material Editor when applying the textures? I know it depends on what you are aiming to achieve for the type of environment that you are trying to accomplish, however I don't know if I could add more nodes to my texture files in the Material Editor to get better results?
I feel like my textures on my models could look better, however I don't know if it's something I need to do in Photoshop or the Material Editor in Unreal Engine 4?
Any feedback on this is greatly appreciated. Thank you
So first of all I hope this is the right thread to post the two questions that I have. These questions relate to Environment and Prop Artist work.
Okay so my first question is which website do you all use for your textures to get high quality textures? Is their a website that has high quality texture images, or would CG Textures still be a good website to get textures from?
The second question I have is when I apply the textures to the model in Unreal Engine 4 after making it in Maya. Are there different tutorials on how to get good results for your textures? What I mean is how do you know which nodes to use in the Material Editor when applying the textures? I know it depends on what you are aiming to achieve for the type of environment that you are trying to accomplish, however I don't know if I could add more nodes to my texture files in the Material Editor to get better results?
I feel like my textures on my models could look better, however I don't know if it's something I need to do in Photoshop or the Material Editor in Unreal Engine 4?
Any feedback on this is greatly appreciated. Thank you
Replies
Cgtextures is great, but artists still need to learn how to use textures properly for their models to look good.
We have some great resources here.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/TexturingTutorials
Post images of your current work. As someone else said... Make art. Post it for critique. Don't be afraid. Do it. Get critiques.
Make improvements in your work. Post again, ask for more critique. Repeat.
We also have some good resources here about how to use material nodes.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture
But looking at your older work I suspect you may need some help with lighting.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Lighting
There is an another thing that its useful to keep in mind... Its usually better to work with master shaders, and to use its child (instance) on every similar surface. With this, you would make only one nodeweb and including every function into this, that you want to use on its instances later. Examples for usual parameters in this case: controllable tiling, controllable roughness, maybe a color multiply wuth a vector parameter on base color, and TEXTURE PARAMETER SLOTS so you can replace the used textures with a few clicks in the instances. But these depends on what you need!
My opinion on your texture question: I think it is really rare nowadays to use textures that you grab from a site like you mentioned. Those are plain photos full of with lighting , that doesn't work well together with pbr. You can of course, but you get better result with making your own. If you take a look at any AAA game's art dump, you clearly never see surfaces that made from a simple photo. People make a detailed highpoly even for tiling surfaces, and bake them, and go from there. Not every company, client or game require this, but for quality next gen or prev gen art, the best way to go is obviously the good old highpoly->lowpoly workflow.
As a good alternative, there are very good procedural texture makers nowadays.
Also, you can always paint. But still, everything depends on the requirements.