Questions about Procedural Texturing
Hello everyone, I had some questions about procedural texturing for anyone who might be able to answer.
I found out about the process just a couple months ago, and I've managed to learn a bit about it from a YouTube channel called Ryan King Art. However, I was wondering if anyone here knew how to very accurately re-create existing images with procedural texturing, or knew of any tutorials on how to do so. I'm a bit of a slow learner so while I'm sure if I spent enough time learning how it works, it'd be really nice to have a more direct tutorial on this sort of thing.
Someone on Art Station named Daniel Thiger did a pretty impressive re-creation of a photo with procedural texturing which is what got me interested in the whole thing, as I'm remastering a game that largely has photo based textures. I wasn't able to get in contact with them however, so I thought it might help to ask around here on polycount. Thanks in advance to anyone who might have some answers :).
Replies
Can you show an image of what you're trying to do? Exactly what kind of photo content?
He has a lot of stuff in his portfolio. https://dete.artstation.com/
I was specifically referring to this one here: https://dete.artstation.com/projects/1n8LBq
Or were you asking to see what I'm wanting to recreate?
Hmm.
That sort of technique is beyond a tutorial. I mean, you might find something that will guide you to recreate a very specific thing, but it won't teach you the fundamentals you need to do your own things.
I'd recommend getting familiar enough with Designer that you know what to google for, ie: "Create realistic wood grain in substance designer"
Dannie Carlone is a texturing wizard, there are some techniques in here that might point you in the right direction: https://80.lv/articles/combining-zbrush-and-substance-designer-for-games/
Thanks for the info! I appreciate it. I'm currently using Blender since Substance seemed to struggle with my PC for some reason, but I might have to try it again.
Those are sort of the kind of tutorials I'm looking for I suppose. The tutorials I find are usually "here's how to create this random texture", and I guess I'm looking for something more like "Here's an existing photo or image, here's what you should look for in the image to tell you what procedural processes to use to recreate them." Like I mentioned, I know I'll probably eventually pick up on that sort of thing by watching lots of different tutorials, I was just hoping there might be some things that were more direct in that sense, but I haven't found any yet.
Have you looked at Adobe's site? Tons of great resources to get you going:
https://substance3d.adobe.com/tutorials?software=Substance%203D%20Designer
As just one example: https://substance3d.adobe.com/tutorials/courses/creating-a-tudor-house-wall
I hadn't, thanks for the info! I'll see what I can learn from it
Stick with the tutorials on fundamentals, so that as you develop the eye for breaking things down you'll have the understanding to recreate it. If you find the shortcut to artistic mastery, let us all know. 😋
exactly that.
breaking the reference down is a question of identifying shapes and patterns at different scales (eg, large, medium, small).
you learn to make the shapes and patterns by following the basic tutorials
I (as do most) recommend you start by generating height information for the larger shapes and work in more detail as you go.
+1
That’s a solid chunk of glorious poo. And thanks Ben.
Thanks for all the info everyone, I'll keep trying my best to learn this stuff
Don't be discouraged at your first few attempts to make a fully procedural material fall short of Daniel Thiger, there are not many people that are at his level with purely designer. 90% of the time it's about knowing how to use the same dozen substance nodes over and over really well to work into the different height details. Seems simple but it's really not easy to nail a realistic material from a photo ref, takes a lot of studying graphs, tutorials and breaking down the ref image to get anywhere to a decent level. Plus it takes a good while (A lot of the time I don't get the luxury to spend the time on a fully designer only material in my day to day :()
While Substance Designer is my main work skill and tool for a couple decades already. I could say I instantly see what's procedural and whats real in any work , even done by bests of the best. And to get any close to that "real looking" level you need insane amount of time in Designer .
Much more then photogrammetry and Reality Capture would take you to same visual quality. Imo the only area where procedural textures are sound time wise IMO is something you couldn't easily take shots of and where you need several alternating textures of same subject.
I would say a quick procedural way to get something real looking is using 3d package with node based shader editor and small geometry distributor, node based and manual plus GPU render/baker with AOVs .
That way your materials are truly universal and always sharp . You never deal with triplanar blurrier projections or lack of tiny shadows you still need to bake in.
I am still using Designer just because i am accustomed to use it. Once ClarisseFX will release its hybrid GPU render I'll probably buy it and switch.
you can also practice some of the techniques for creating procedural textures in photoshop using filters like noise/high pass/clouds/emboss etc
Thanks for all the info everyone. I understand that it'll be difficult to learn, though I'm hoping it's easier to grasp for me than drawing from scratch. I've been trying to learn that for years but without much luck. I'm looking to very accurately recreate textures like this but in 4096x4096.
AI upscaling sucks so I don't want to use that, I want it as high quality as possible, so I've definitely got my work cut out for me hahaha.
Oh, I forgot to include this in the original post, but if anyone is willing to help make some textures for me, that would also be awesome. I've been working on the game for years and I'm dying to see more progress, so even just 1 texture done would be a huge help and greatly appreciated. I'll of course keep doing my best to learn how to do this all myself and get better at art, but any help would be amazing, and I'm fully willing to compensate people for their work if they want.
The game has a wide array of textures, so if anyone does want to help and has a particular kind of texture that they're good at making, such as stone walls, fabric, wood, etc., I'll be sure to pick the sort of thing that you're most comfortable working with. Thanks in advance to anyone willing to lend a hand!
If you just need textures like those, and don’t want to wait, I’d suggest checking out the excellent, and absolutely license free CC0 assets here: https://polyhaven.com
If you consider them worthy, it would be great to contribute a bit to their fund. It’s a great resource, well worth supporting.
Thanks haha, I actually use this site all the time and have a whole library of just their textures. I've played around with them and put a few in the game for fun, but the point of my Remastering project is to make them look exactly like the originals, just better. Upscaling sucks so I don't want to do that anymore, so now I'm tasked with learning to re-create photo real images. It's why Daniel Thiger's recreation of that photo reference with Procedural texturing intrigued me so much.
Looking at the posted normal map I think it's AI produced by Sampler or something. Not very crysp and hi quality really . Lots of "brighter color is height" artifacts . Would look pretty noisy and inspecific at certain light angles my guess . If you satisfied with that you definitly could AI upsacale the color and then repeat the same "photo to normal map" thing.
It's possible but I don't know for sure, it's made by Capcom. I'm looking to recreate things in the highest possible quality in 4096x4096 so I wouldn't want to use that method, and I really want to get away from AI upscaling, but thanks for the info.