How To PBR On A Budget - Feedback Requested
polycounter lvl 3
Happy Friday guys!
I've been working this one a while and I think it's about time to get some feedback. Ended up deviating from the concept slightly because of personal preference but I liked the look overall and wanted to stay relatively close to the original idea. As the title implies I had to do some painstaking PS since I don't have substance or ddo so let me know what you think. Rendered in toolbag2.
Any feedback would be appreciated.
Concept by Oscar Cafaro.
I've been working this one a while and I think it's about time to get some feedback. Ended up deviating from the concept slightly because of personal preference but I liked the look overall and wanted to stay relatively close to the original idea. As the title implies I had to do some painstaking PS since I don't have substance or ddo so let me know what you think. Rendered in toolbag2.
Any feedback would be appreciated.
Concept by Oscar Cafaro.
Replies
It goes like this:
Prototype your materials in Toolbag2, or UE4 (if you have literally no money at all, then unreal). And at this point you should just be looking at Albedo, Metallic, and Roughness values. That's all.
Once you know the base values of your materials, create a group in photoshop for each material. In each group you'll have a layer for Albedo, a layer for Roughness, and a layer for Metallic.
Then you mask off the entire group, and start painting the material back on by adding white to the mask.
A simple photoshop action for hiding and unhiding layers based on name suffixes (ie: steel_ALBEDO) and saving them out to the appropriate texture maps and you're done.
There are a couple reasons I chose photoshop for is. First I wanted to use this project as a way to drive home the principles behind the PBR workflow on the lowest level. The second reason is I'm still on the fence between dDo and the substance tools. On the one hand I have experience using the Quixel suite and my experience has been really good so far but at the same time substance seems to be the new standard in the industry for PBR textures. I've heard good and bad things on both sides. Any thoughts on this? What is your preferred toolset?
On the other hand though Quixel is a pretty clunky program to use as it can take a fair bit of time waiting for textures to apply an update. Substance is a program built from the ground up so it runs a lot more smoothly but has it's annoyances too. No option to render screen shots and you have to download the entire program manually with each update. Also the supplied materials in substance seem to be less than Quixel but there website has free once constantly being added which is great.
I'm still pretty new to PBR but those are my experiences so far.
Any comments on the helmet to this point? How did I do?
My personal preference at the moment is Substance... the combination of designer and painter is incredibly powerful and painter alone is an excellent software to use. I've moved my entire workflow over to substance tools pretty much (though it's always good to learn/know quixel AND substance. never know what the client will want!). Once you understand the substance tools there are things you can do with them that to my knowledge, you just can't with quixel (anisotropic direction map ooooooo yes).
Both tools are incredibly powerful, and will speed up your workflow greatly.
Anyone have any critiques or comments about the helmet specifically? If not I think I may call it done after a few more adjustments. I also want to try out a few color alternatives. Marmoset viewer update to come at some point.