Is there a way to determine the accurate texture from any photo precisely?
polycounter lvl 10
So, I have been wondering about this. Say u have something like this;
I just grabbed this from google . Is there a way u can get the original texture colors from a photo or remove the lighting/shadows.
When I do studies, I usually eyeball the texture color and I get very close to it and have a good understanding of lighting and how textures should look when lit.But it would be nice if there is a way to calculate the correct hue, vaule and saturation of a give surface if it is not lit.
Here, the textures are no longer accurate with the blue hue from the sky and yellowish light from the bulbs?
Maybe like a diffuse version with all lighting and shadows removed. I doubt though but decided to ask anyway.
I think this wouldn't be possible as textures are best captured in a overcast sky lighting? It would be awesome if there is some sort of AI that can do this, sort of gauge the accurate color, saturation and value from photo and it reads accurately in different lighting conditions.
Any ideas.
I just grabbed this from google . Is there a way u can get the original texture colors from a photo or remove the lighting/shadows.
When I do studies, I usually eyeball the texture color and I get very close to it and have a good understanding of lighting and how textures should look when lit.But it would be nice if there is a way to calculate the correct hue, vaule and saturation of a give surface if it is not lit.
Here, the textures are no longer accurate with the blue hue from the sky and yellowish light from the bulbs?
Maybe like a diffuse version with all lighting and shadows removed. I doubt though but decided to ask anyway.
I think this wouldn't be possible as textures are best captured in a overcast sky lighting? It would be awesome if there is some sort of AI that can do this, sort of gauge the accurate color, saturation and value from photo and it reads accurately in different lighting conditions.
Any ideas.
Replies
I am guessing it's impossible.
Is there a sort of chart/ vaule range of what color different materials should have without lighting information.
More info why
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/imperfection-for-perfection
@Eric Chadwick I checked it out the latest demo about it. The one they released yesterday. Its cool. But is there much difference between this and designer or painter. Though it seems faster and more hands on. The colors u pick from the images in the demo. They are not accurate. These are colors already contaminated with light, bleed, e.t.c. U might import the textures into the scene and they may be too saturated or muddy due to the difference in lighting between ur scene and lighting in photo sampled. Of course, color correction can be used to tweak this.
There needs to be a way to calibrate lighting in any kind of photo and lighting in a 3d scene, so the right colors are used hence looks correct in any other lighting condition. I also feel overcast lighting isn't good enough for accurate colours as other lighting factors as well as the ones we mentioned still exist somewhat. Maybe I am looking too much into things :- )
As for what I was looking into. It seems I have found some sort of way to get close to what color should be. I am still not very sure if this works in all materials per se.
So I will experiment further. Also another thing to note is the difference btw color picker in photoshop and 3dsmax.
If you actually think about the problem you'll realise that it's unsolvable and the best you can hope for is an educated guess - Which is what you're doing when you eyeball it.
You can measure this stuff on site if you take special equipment - you cannot measure it from an LDR photo which has had it's colour profiles buggered around with in photoshop.
@gnoop That looks cool. It seems close to what I am talking about. They stopped selling standalone? I still think the tech is still in its early stages. Needs more research but the software is definitely a start in the right direction.
In this case since it is a photo from the web, there isn't enough resolution to actually pull textures off of it. Why does it need to be accurate? Intuition tells us that concrete is slightly on the warm side of grey. A little bit of artistic license and you can work your way into an good match.
It's like me asking you to tell me what the value of X is in the following equation...
X = Y
It doesn't mean we can't make a good guess with software but don't fool yourself that it'll be physically accurate
eg. https://salman-h-khan.github.io/papers/TPAMI15.pdf
@Eric Chadwick
Alchemist has a few extras that aren't in designer yet - better normal to height conversion and delighting are among them. They'll filter through soon enough though.
@AlecMoody I am not saying I can't get a good match by eyeballing it. I can do that easily . I am wondering if it is possible which I speculated was not possible in my first post but I think is something we can diccuss and think about. So I made a thread about it. As for height or other map extraction, there are already softwares for that. My gripe is diffuse, correct diffuse from a photo.
Not everyone can afford to travel to different countries and snap photogrammetry pictures for a particular asset/environment if they wanted to. Or say a particular type of expensive furniture, are u gonna go buy one to get the correct textures or go out to a furniture workshop to go snap one. What if this isn't available around your area. U travel? When u could just grab a photo from google and be done with it.
If u are given a photo to reconstruct a scene say this building has been demolished a couple of years ago, u have to get the diffuse color correctly, there is no way u can get the correct diffuse with photogrammetry since it no longer exist. U have to eyeball it which I am good at but having something like this makes things locked down and more streamlined and the asset can be tested in different lighting conditions and it looks accurate down to the T.
There are softwares like substance designer that enables u to build materials from scratch but that color been sampled from photos isn't accurate. U might have to do a lot of eyebaling to ensure it looks correct in every lighting condition.
Concrete has different kinds of hues, saturation and vaules, from age, weather, moss, rust or painted color so, starting with warm grey wouldn't work in every situation.
@poopipe U have a point, I agree but maybe 2050, this is possible!! :- )
@bitinn Thanks for the link, mate. Nice to know some research is being done in this area.
At the end of the day, it is not possible, Eyeballing is your best bet but it is always good to raise a point about something u find interesting while working in cg. U never know, the future might decide to surprise us or maybe not.