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Tips for Capturing Tennis Ball Photos and PBR Material Creation

konst22
konst22
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konst22

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.

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  • konst22
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    konst22
    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
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  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter
    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
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  • konst22
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    konst22
    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).
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  • lukors
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    lukors polycounter lvl 10
    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.
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  • iam717
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    iam717 greentooth
    This is a link:  If you did not already do this. Video list on youtube.
    i never did anything close to this.
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  • Klunk
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    Klunk ngon master
    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

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  • Eric Chadwick
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    Eric Chadwick admin
    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
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  • Eric Chadwick
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    Eric Chadwick admin

    https://free3d.com/3d-model/tennis-ball-5173.html
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  • Eric Chadwick
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    Eric Chadwick admin
    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
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  • Neox
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    Neox godlike master sticky
    how close do you need to be? i'd maybe aim to use fur shells here tbh
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  • Klunk
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    Klunk ngon master
    I just popped in to say another option is "old school" shell fur :) but I was beaten to it !
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  • gnoop
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    gnoop sublime tool
    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.

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  • Eric Chadwick
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    Eric Chadwick admin
    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.
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  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter
    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 


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  • gnoop
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    gnoop sublime tool
    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 .

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  • iam717
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    iam717 greentooth
    Rt/RT Tennis ball attempt:  (still w.i.p.) no shells yet used solid geo.
    I did this to take on the challenge.

    updated video, i tried i could also do this without the alpha just to not use it and make accurate strands.

    final below

    (now i can say i did it so i can speak on it, i am limited by the driver of nvidia, this shouldn't have been possible which leads me to believe we are being hindered at the driver/hardware level, purposefully?) That or marmoset video driver or whatever needs work? to allow higher resolution renderings, but i could do it before so? strange..
    i experienced black screen, i will try to figure it out.


    Notes:
    This is all marmoset except for the video, the video would NOT render, or it would be HIGHER quality, i can do it with other things but not this...< render in marmoset higher, no issues. (HQ vids/pix)
    No lights just scene hdri, i had to use an outside screen recorder to give you all this video... it was a mess but its there.

    the more i know :)

    Took way to long to figure it out, figured it out today.07/24,

     oh yea, make it smaller to see the results of distance..update of an alternative look, this has a shell.  update soonish working it out, still.
    6400 tris atm.

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  • iam717
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    iam717 greentooth
    figured out the issue this is mine i do not have access to fusion.: new render soon,  might share the process though its not really a mystery. this was fun but very annoying, at the same time :).

    rendering issue on my end, using perspective made it work... shaking my head i spent so much time... wondering what it was..
    .Oh and also sry to hijack the thread (i suppose) , though op hasn't responded and shown anything, i was "inspired' by the post and thought it would be a very difficult task and than added more difficulty when i didn't want to make shells for it.

    Would love to see what op does with the information, a capture would be 1000% better than my mashup attempt.


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