Tips for Capturing Tennis Ball Photos and PBR Material Creation

konst22 · Jun 9 2024

Hey everyone,

I'm looking to create a photorealistic PBR (Physically Based Rendering) material/texture for a tennis ball. I'd like to capture my own photos of a real tennis ball and use those as the basis for the texture.

I'm wondering if anyone has experience with this and could offer some guidance. Specifically, I'd love to know:

Software: What software would you recommend for capturing the images, creating the texture, and generating the PBR maps?
Workflow: What's the general workflow for this process? Do you have any specific techniques or tips for getting the best results?

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

konst22 · Jun 9 2024

PS Let's say that this is a unique tennis ball, and I would like to convey all the features of its texture, create a digital clone of it. And its shape is a perfect sphere

poopipe · Jun 9 2024

It depends how photorealistic you want it to be ..

if you want to really push it I dont think photosourcing the textures is the right way to go due to it being a fuzzy cloth material

konst22 · Jun 9 2024

I see) Then it could be a golf ball or Globe. I'm interested in the technique of creating such a texture/material from real object. I understand that I can spin the ball on an axis and take photos from multiple angles. But what to do with them next? Main question for me: How to sew them together into one whole and how to make a texture out of it? Now there are many programs into which you can upload a photo of, say, a sculpture and get a 3D model with a texture. But I only need a high quality texture (since my object is a sphere).

lukors · Jun 10 2024

I would do a 3d scan to create a textured 3d model and then reproject the texture onto an unwrapped sphere with the UV layout I want.

iam717 · Jun 10 2024

This is a link: If you did not already do this. Video list on youtube.

i never did anything close to this.

Klunk · Jun 10 2024

it's a "matted" fibrous texture aka felt with a rubber seam

you could probably find something similar that is "flat", scouring pad perhaps which might be better to deal with.... or something procedural to generate the material
tennis ball felt

Eric Chadwick · Jun 10 2024

You can't really do a furry surface with a regular PBR shader. You need a fur rendering system. For example VRayFur https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/tennis-ball-fur-3d-1144972

Eric Chadwick · Jun 10 2024

https://free3d.com/3d-model/tennis-ball-5173.html

Eric Chadwick · Jun 11 2024

You can also do similar stuff in real-time, if you're willing to do some fancy shader stuff. Airbørn has some great examples of this:
https://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2775062/#Comment_2775062

Neox · Jun 11 2024

how close do you need to be? i'd maybe aim to use fur shells here tbh

Klunk · Jun 11 2024

I just popped in to say another option is "old school" shell fur

but I was beaten to it !

gnoop · Jun 11 2024

Physically based materials in games IMO are true looking only for limited number of subjects. Like something plain plastic or metal. And even never look same in different renderers. Compare iray and GL in substance designer /painter for example.

Anything complex like grass , asphalt surface , snow , velvet , anything fury , grainy or porous behind normal map texel size but still not micro enough to be just roughness and you would need special hacks which are usually quite hard to do because PBR materials , especially metallic workflow style are usually totally locked.

For such furry ball if you don't have special fur shader you would need custom highlight spot and custom Fresnel to fake SSS at least which contradict PBR idea. Would be possible in old style legacy shader in 3d max or with an extra non-PBR layer on top of PBR base.

Eric Chadwick · Jun 11 2024

To be faior though, PBR has been extended quite a bit lately, so you can do velvet etc. fairly easily.
https://ericchadwick.com/gltf/index.html#GlamVelvetSofa
https://ericchadwick.com/gltf/index.html#ToyCar

Blender now has full support for all these PBR effects, in both EEVEE and Cycles, and you can export them to glTF.

No fur yet though. I'm hoping Gaussian splats/NeRFs will take over for realtime fur etc.

poopipe · Jun 13 2024

I think the OP is more interested in getting photosourced materials from 'any' sphere

I had a small think about that and wondered if it were possible to apply the same technique used for HDR capture from a chrome ball

I then stopped thinking and didn't investigate any further

In terms of NERFs / Gaussian Splats for fur...
I think there's merit to that but based on the experience I've had of volumetric fur rendering they tend to fall down when the fur isn't fairly homogeneous - i expect it would work well on a tennis ball but not so much as a general technique. The issue is mostly around how to tell it what to look like than whether it looks nice or not

gnoop · Jun 13 2024

Eric Chadwick said:

Blender now has full support for all these PBR effects, in both EEVEE and Cycles, and you can export them to glTF.

Yeah it sure has , but still doesn't have ambient occlusion texture support in EVE which is way more important IMO for a typical game. Before they had specular scalar at least . As of velvet I do a hack with normal map usually and a bit of subtle metallic traces for regular metallic /roughness style shaders . Our game has nothing like those new PBR things .

Tips for Capturing Tennis Ball Photos and PBR Material Creation

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