Texturing workflow - newbie questions
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Hi,
I'm fairly new to 3d modeling and I'm currently working on the basics of modeling, shading, texturing, scultping and lighting.
I still have problems understanding the texturing process for my assets, especially for my portfolio in the future.
There are quite a few sites that offer textures for download that can be used for free or for money. But I am not sure whether I can and should use these or create my own textures from scratch.
When creating for example a single prop, let's say a shack; should I just use a wood plank tileable texture that I download from the internet and tweak this, or should I aim at creating a completely hand-made texture? Should I use textures like photos from the internet, or do I have to make my own, or generate them procedurally?
Let's say you create an environment with many props, do you hand paint all the textures or do you use downloaded ones and tweak them?
What is accetable in a portfolio?
And how will the process be e.g. in a game studio?
Thanks in advance!
I'm fairly new to 3d modeling and I'm currently working on the basics of modeling, shading, texturing, scultping and lighting.
I still have problems understanding the texturing process for my assets, especially for my portfolio in the future.
There are quite a few sites that offer textures for download that can be used for free or for money. But I am not sure whether I can and should use these or create my own textures from scratch.
When creating for example a single prop, let's say a shack; should I just use a wood plank tileable texture that I download from the internet and tweak this, or should I aim at creating a completely hand-made texture? Should I use textures like photos from the internet, or do I have to make my own, or generate them procedurally?
Let's say you create an environment with many props, do you hand paint all the textures or do you use downloaded ones and tweak them?
What is accetable in a portfolio?
And how will the process be e.g. in a game studio?
Thanks in advance!
Replies
Using textures from a texture site like CGtextures is fine, however be aware that using other peoples pre made textures could have issues in them like directional lighting and other things like that.
Using these kind of textures means you have to do allot of work multiple times, as you will need to generate all the maps yourself.
Like Albedo, roughness, normals and any other maps.
That being said, using a standard photo of something probably will not work right in PBR.
As the Albedo map should not have any lighting in it.
Nowadays allot of texturing is done through the Quixel suite or Substance.
You basically apply different materials to your models, based on masks and what not and it will generate your final maps for you.
You'd want to find a method that works for your needs and that is efficient.
So again, while photo sourcing is a legit way to do things, it is generally more difficult to work with them as you have to generate everything from the diffuse. And with PBR a straight up diffuse wont cut it, you need to manipulate the photo to work for your needs.
I'd say scanned data is pretty much the top of the line at the moment.
Quixel/substance mid to high tier.
And photo sources (single shot) low to mid tier.
My reasoning for this is basically scanned data will get you as close to realism as possible, if done right.
Scanned data can be pretty technical. As you will work with scanning real life objects, needing to clean that up.
Grab your textures from the scanned data and preferably have a polarized version of the textures as well.
You can then generate your specular map from dividing the polarized with the albedo.
You still need to create a roughness map.
You can generate high frequancy details from the diffuse texture, but you still need to go in and sculpt your mid frequency details and enhance the high frequency details manually as well.
This presentation by the MPC guys show how they went about mixing scanned data with manual work and what not.
Quixel/Substance is pretty much the standard (afaik) currently when it comes to generating textures.
Quixel has a library scanned data that you can use to create your final textures, using advanced masks basically.
So it is basically scanned data as well, however the only thing you worry about is applying materials.
Substance is basically procedurally creating your map.
Your whole process starts from the high poly, generally.
Quick overview of the quixel DDO tools.
Photo sourcing, from a single photo is 'previous gen'.
You still start of with a high poly and bake your base maps down, like normals, curvature, ao, etc.
However you now need to manually place the textures to fit the UV's. You manually need to fix seams, you manually need to create your roughness/specular maps, etc. etc. basically allot of manual work.
To be fair, you would need to do the same with scanned data to a certain extent as well.
Process of 'photosourced' texturing.
That being said, you can definitely mix and match the methods. However you need to be fully aware of what you are doing.
If you do not understand how to author textures and how they work with shaders, it would help you to generate results pretty quickly by using quixel/substance.
However if you rely solely on programs like that to generate your maps for you, you will have a though time to figure out how everything works 'behind the scenes'.
So again find a method that works for your needs and do it effeciently.
If your needs are to simply get textures done without needing to know the technicals > quixel/substance.
If it is to create art to the highest quality > scanned data + a mix of manual work.
If you need to understand everything > try everything. As you often times need to mix and match(photosource/scanned data + 'preocedural generator + hand painting) to get the result you want, in an efficient manner.
Also a quick note, scanned data, is different from 'standard' photosourcing. It also doesnt neccesarily mean just scans of 3d objects. what quixel did (afaik), they actually scanned real life surfaces, not just straight up photos. So these scanned data from Quixel contain data about the albedo, specular, roughness, metallic, normals/bumps, etc.
With photo sourcing you rely on a single photograph of a surface. This photo will contain a bunch of things in it. It will have (ambient) light data, specular data, etc. baked in them. Which means for a PBR, you will need to extract the light data from the photo so you are only left with the albedo/pure colour data. you will need to get rid of high light, etc. Basically from a single source, you will need to subtract data, and generate data from it as well. Which will be inaccurate. Expecially if the source is not optimal either.
Anyway these are my personal views. Take them as you like and do your own research on the subject matter.
Verify what i said is true or false, find what works for you, etc. etc.
I am a research nut so the first thing I did was go all over researching for tools that the pros use then when I found out about one I discovered others too. I just recently bought a $10 a month subscription to Substance (half off for a year!) and you can trove through hundreds of textures, and the beauty of them is that they are up to 4k (I think some in 8k), they're PBR and photoscanned and you can tweak them as much as you want to create new textures. They also have Substance Designer and Bitmap2Material, but for now I am just learning Painter. From what I understand so far, Designer is used to create your own textures from nothing, I thought it was godlike when I saw a few YouTube vids of it! B2M is for tweaking the textures and baking maps and tiling them easily.
Then there is Quixel NDO and DDO and it is kinda the same, it works within Photoshop, it seams to me as if it is easier to use if you want to just quickly add textures, which I guess is why they call it Quixel. Substance painter is way more complex, I am just learning the basics of it now but I will say they make some damn good tutorial videos on it.
As faithG mentioned there is also scanning, I read a lot about it and watched a lot of videos on it and plan on trying it soon, basically they take a lot of pictures from a specific area that interests them and then they create PBR textures and even models, I think Star Wars BattleFront used a lot of this.