Texturing general

[Anonymous No.771975]

I figured we could have a general for texturing, where we could talk about texturing workflows, tools and ask non-technical questions.

For texturing I'm using Substance, and recently I started using Mixer quite a lot as well. I'm actually using it to create trims and I'm using it for some unique environment pieces, but not hero props. For those I still prefer Substance Painter just because the tools are more refined IMO and painting details isn't as laggy as it is in Mixer.

That being said, I've been looking at some Mari tutorials on YT, and I noticed the workflow looks kinda different from Substance and Mixer. I see people usually start by gathering photo textures and then they create masks from those and paint them by projecting them on the surface, example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phqE5nPBCyc

It actually inspired me to start doing the same, because for some reason I never did it before - I'd just use various smart masks in Painter and then break them up by hand to reduce the procedural look. I never textured by projecting a photo, though. Is this a thing in Mari? What do you think of this approach? One more example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTkoSuMEP6I

On the other hand, after starting to use Mixer and learning its workflow, I realized I should use more displacement masks from base materials to blend new materials on top, similar to how blending threshold works in Mixer.

What I'm trying to say is, it might be a very good idea to try out different software and see how they work, because it might enlighten you with new approaches to texturing and improve your work in the future. That's how I realized I really like Mixer's way of blending materials from bottom or top, by using displacement masks and a threshold. It gives natural looking results instantly.

[Anonymous No.771976]

>>771975
think I can make simple clothing textured with a mouse and keyboard on substance or 3dcoat? also which is best in this case (or less worse)

[Anonymous No.771978]

>>771976
Oh for sure you can do it only with a mouse. Most people are using mouse + keyboard. Unless you want to create a stylized hand painted texture, tablet probably won't be needed.

I haven't used 3dcoat, but Substance can definitely do it easily. I'm just going through some of her videos and there's one on texturing realistic jeans, you can check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gow8m9l7NLo

Great channel btw, in fact probably one of the best ones for intermediates and above. It won't handhold you throughout the process, but you can pick up some good info. Honestly, it's even better than all of the paid texturing courses I've seen.

[Anonymous No.772004]

I know how substance and mixer work since I use them but Mari was always a mystery to me. How does it even work? Does it have a library of material? Is it procedural? Why people even use it?

[Anonymous No.772027]

>>771975
I think its a great idea to have a thread that focuses on a discipline rather than a software. Like you said trying out different tools is a great way to force yourself to think outside the box.

[Anonymous No.772045]

>>771978
oh well, I was wondering more along the lines of hand-painted stuff, but as the name suggests, I had it coming...

[Anonymous No.772103]

>>772045
I mean maybe I can use my phone and draw with my fingers? that'd be better than using mnk desu. does anyone know of a good drawing app for android?

[Anonymous No.772106]

>>772103
It's possible to paint with a mouse, it will just be harder, that's all. I even sculpted a character bust once with a mouse. I've seen people use 3d coat more for hand painting for some reason, although you can do it in Substance too. Why don't you just try it for yourself and see if you can manage?

[Anonymous No.772111]

Is anyone still sculpting leaves and then texturing them in Substance or whatever? It was done that way in games before, but I don't know if everything switched to photoscans these days.

I've seen some people make leaf generators in SD, but they usually don't really look that good. I assume anything other than photos was never a thing for movies though, as it can never be as photorealistic as the real thing. Does anybody in studios still seek people with these skills?

[Anonymous No.772226]

In what formats do you guys save your textures? I'm trying to do some optimization for my project now and atm I'm resizing some decals and adding opacity in albedo's alpha channel to reduce the texture count. I thought about saving in LZW compressed TIFF because it's not taking much memory and still retains the alpha. Do compressed files somehow affect render times as well? I never bothered with this before, but it started to take a long time to load all the textures in VRAM when I'm rendering, and I figured I need to reduce that time as much as I can. Afaik, png can't save the opacity in alpha, so it's either targa or tiff, right?

[Anonymous No.772266]

>>772226
I use OpenEXR, 16-bit for everything except depth AOVs and similar, which usually need 32-bit. I always compress them as ZIPS.

On PNG, yeah, it sucks. It forces you to use a sRGB curve instead of linear, it cannot store float, it cannot have multiple layers or parts, and (perhaps most importantly) uses unassociated alpha, so it cannot store transparent "emissive" pixels. It's also slow as fuck to read/write.

Simply put, if you love yourself, stop using PNG now.

[Anonymous No.772298]

>>772266
Shoud I also get rid of jpegs as well? Does it somehow actually create a visual difference or not? And do they affect render times negatively for some reason?

[Anonymous No.772301]

>>771975
An actual thread with an Op who isn't a narcissistic retard? God damn.
I'm going to go though your links and if it seems like I have anything useful to say I'll respond later.

Thanks for actually making a decent thread.

[Anonymous No.772320]

>>771975
>I never textured by projecting a photo, though. Is this a thing in Mari? What do you think of this approach?
It is THE thing in Mari. That's how Mari came into existence, with this principle. You should look into the history of the program, its quite interesting.
We all have James Cameron to thank for this tool quasi, because Weta created it for the production of Avatar. First it was an in-house tool but later it was sold to Foundry (similar to the history of Katana which was an in-house lighting-tool from Sony Pictures).
With its paint buffer projection workflow, Mari is the definite solution for projecting high resolution photoscans or simple photography onto meshes and use them in an photoshop like program except its in 3D and it has a Node editor like Nuke/Substance designer.
The other power of Mari is its performance and data management ability which is necessary to render cinematic VFX. James Cameron wanted 4 or 8K texture resolution and not only one texture per object, literally hundreds of them. And thus UDIMs were born.
That's a short rundown of its origin story.
Mari is a beast, it has more depth than any other 3D painting software.
But due to its complexity it has some downsides. Its slow to setup and work with. Steep learning curve. Very hardware hungry (depending on your project). UI is packed, clunky and oldschool.
>>772004
>Does it have a library of material?
not really, but it has some form of batch converter so you could feed it an folder with PBR textures and it turns them into materials, also you can import Megascan materials.
>Is it procedural?
yes it can be
Why people even use it?
because its the only program that can handle the complexity that the movie VFX industry demands. Tons of UDIM's with up to 32K texture resolution, hardware is the limit.

[Anonymous No.772322]

>>771975
You can probably implement a similar height based blending style in SP using an anchor on a passthrough height layer.

[Anonymous No.772375]

Is armor paint good yet?

[Anonymous No.772451]

so apparently diffuse and albedo are not the same?? what a country

[Anonymous No.772457]

hennig and morten from flippednormals hate mari, and say it doesnt get updates anymore and its workflow is horrible.

[Anonymous No.772484]

3D Coat and Photoshop for me. I've tried Mari and it's the industry standard but frankly, it's not as immediate or fluid or sensuous as painting with 3D Coat. With Mari you set up your texture in 2d overlapping the 3d object then you drop it all down at once. With 3d Coat you're aware of painting 3d textures with color, gloss and even normal map displacement in real time. Very satisfying.

[Anonymous No.772485]

>>772484
MARI handles asset sizes that would make 3DC puke its guts out

[Anonymous No.772486]

3D coat has the most direct and straightfoward interface for texture painting.

[Anonymous No.772488]

>>772485
Go back and read what I said; Mari is the unchallenged industry standard, but if you're working for WETA or Dreamworks then you're probably not posting on this board. And if you're an amature then you're going to have more fun and immediate satisfaction with 3D Coat.

[Anonymous No.772489]

>>772486
>using Christian software

[Anonymous No.772490]

>>772489
Oh dear, like that's a consideration one way or the other. I know, you're offended Andrew opposes porn and masturbation, your two favorite hobbies.

[Anonymous No.772530]

I get blurry edges when baking ao maps in substance, thus everything bleeds. What the hell could be wrong? The edges are sharp and all. I'm completely at loss.

[Anonymous No.772551]

>>772530
Show UVs and show your cage if you have one

[Anonymous No.772628]

>>772551
It happens even with a default cube from blender.

[Anonymous No.772642]

>>772530
Even the noise is blurry.

[Anonymous No.773225]

How do i make this kind of tilling?
I can do square tilling but dont know how to make them tile around a circle.

[Anonymous No.773291]

>>771975
I am still learning modelling in blendererr, should I learn to unwrap and texture within blender or use some other software ?

[Anonymous No.773294]

>>773225
try using a sphere instead of a circle

[Anonymous No.773296]

For texturing, how much of an upgrade will it be going from GIMP to photoshop (latest)?

[Anonymous No.773303]

>>773225
This looks like a normal tileable texture, they are just using a few different models to showcase it from all angles. Nothing special about it and yours should wrap around like that just fine. You just need to unwrap properly, but these primitives are usually unwrapped by default.

>>773291
Learn how to unwrap in Blender, but I would recommend using another software for texturing, be it Substance, Mixer, Mari or 3D Coat.

>>773296
It would be a bigger upgrade going from GIMP to a modern texturing software (I mentioned them above). Consider doing that first. Also, you can try using Photopea, which is a free web copy of Photoshop. Looks the same, shortcuts are mostly the same, it just doesn't have all the features, but the most used ones are all there. It's pretty damn good for what it is.

https://www.photopea.com/

[Anonymous No.773318]

I took a high resolution picture of a knife and ran it through substance alchemist Image To Material to generate the albedo, normal, roughness, height, and ao maps.

Now assuming I model the knife (easy) and go into substance painter, I want to projection paint the maps with the design on the handle. How do I paint multiple maps at once so they stay aligned ? I figure if I only paint one map at a time such as the albedo, then the normal, then the ao the resulting detail on the handle will get misaligned. Is this possible in painter (as a smart material or something)? Or only possible in Mari? Am I going about this the wrong way? I have a lot of objects around the house that I want to reproduce in 3d by doing this Alchemist Image to Material workflow, but I dont know if its possible

[Anonymous No.773329]

>>773318
turns out it is possible to project paint through multiple channels haha

[Anonymous No.773439]

>>772226
jpg to save space

[Anonymous No.773444]

>>773318
>>773329
From my understanding and what I’m currently doing, I opened up photoshop. Converted the image to RGB. Then paste the two other images in the Green and Blue channels. Paint in Mari. And separate the final painting in photoshop when I’m done.

[Anonymous No.773824]

>>773318
Don't rely on a single image through Alchemist to guess height, it will look really fucked once it's all modeled and in the normal map, it just will assume certain parts are low when they're actually high and vice versa.

Instead take a 6 angle shot (Same picture angle taken with a light shining from 6 different angles, one at a time) and feed that into Alchemist, it'll make a near flawless normal map from it.

[Anonymous No.774108]

>>772484
Do you know where I can find ultra HD 3D models like that?

[Anonymous No.774435]

How would you guys create big models like an old wooden house, but that can look good in super close-ups as well?

General approach in games is a combination of tileables and trimsheets mapped on a fairly low-poly geo, usually with 1 bevel coupled with face-weighted normals.

However, these assets don't really look as good if you use them in a cinematic and a camera goes like 20 cm away from a single wood plank. I assume there's no way around that but to sculpt a bunch of modular planks that make up the whole building. But then, how would you texture all of it? Would you sculpt a few planks with different sizes and create unique textures for them? What if there's a ton of small different pieces and there are too many variations of plank shapes, would there be a like a few dozen unique texture sets for a single building?

I feel like that really is the only answer, just to do it the hard way and spend 100 hours per model, but I wonder what will be potential workflow for those types of assets in the future. I wonder if trimsheets will be gone at some point because if we start sculpting everything, every asset will become a unique, instead of a tileable / trim piece. I know that a potential option would be to still map the low poly on a trimsheet and just add a normal map from a sculpted high poly, but I'm not sure how well would that combo work since the texture wouldn't take that normal into account.

[Anonymous No.774438]

>>774435
In the movies you plan it out so you only make the thing that needs to be right up against camera in that sort of 'good for macro photography' quality. The other parts of the building only need to hold up at a reasonable distance.

[Anonymous No.774896]

>>773318
This is the only thing i know OP, u can do that in blender then move to the the other software.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmbAs9jE1vI

[Anonymous No.777611]

How often are procedurally generated materials used in movies? Or are they always based on photos / scans? How does Pixar make textures for their environments?

Given the fact almost every environments in games is made of real world materials, I still question why is Substance Designer still a thing and used so much. Yeah you have more control, but is it worth spending so many resources on it if other options exist?

[Anonymous No.777612]

>>777611
>How often are procedurally generated materials used in movies? Or are they always based on photos / scans?
There is no separation here. You can mix scans with procedural and its done all the time.
>Yeah you have more control, but is it worth spending so many resources on it if other options exist?
Yes

[Anonymous No.777619]

>>777612
I always feel like I'm cheating if I just use premade tileable textures from libraries. But making it from scratch is somehow a Chad way of doing it, even though it looks like crap in comparison.

Because the difference in skills required is gigantic, and so I always wonder if only using premade tileables in my portfolio projects will somehow affect me negatively.

I for sure can't ever get texturing tasks if I can't do things procedurally, even though I may be able to make great textures by just picking up scans and tweaking them to fit the scene, right?

[Anonymous No.777621]

>>777619
If you can photoedit textures and matte paint detail etc that is infinitly more valuable than if you can enter params into an algorithm.

One thing they can teach anyone to do on the job in next to no time, the other skill takes months and years to get decent at.

[Anonymous No.778443]

How do I learn to make simple textures like this?
Kinda feels like a different thing when compared to realistic textures like you guys make.

What software should I use?

[Anonymous No.778445]

>>778443
Handpainted in photoshop. Pretty entry level knowledge of digital painting will suffice to get toy into that type of stuff.

[Anonymous No.778447]

>>777619
Download Quixel Mixer and learn its workflow to generate variations of tileable textures easily and fast. You can make a couple of variations of a texture in 10 minutes if you know what you are doing.

[Anonymous No.778544]

>>778443
Jesus, are Nintendo still doing the exploded uv map thing with 40 textures.

[Anonymous No.778560]

>>778443
>chest
boinggggggg haha know what I mean guys??

[Anonymous No.779004]

>>771975
Is 3DCoat the be-all-end-all for hand-painting styles/actual painting tools similar to something like Photoshop or is there something else lurking out there?
I might end up texturing dicks with it and I don't want to anger their god because getting struck by lightning sounds like a pretty bad deal.

[Anonymous No.779022]

>>779004
For per pixel there is also bodypaint. I think it's integrated into cinema 4d now.

[Anonymous No.779030]

>>778544
success proves them right

[Anonymous No.779485]

Should I buy the substance designer perpetual license on steam while its still available, or wait until the 2021 version and hope there is still a non-subscription based option?

[Anonymous No.779505]

>>779004
With the amount of features you get with 3d coat it is fantastic. However the ui is a bit iffy it's like the zbrush of texture painting.

[Anonymous No.779520]

>>779485
Will the features of 2020 be relevant in a few years. I have the steam version myself but if they change to subscription I'm just pirating.

[Anonymous No.779524]

>>779485
>>779520
I believe you get maintenance (updates) for a year, no? What you don't get is Source points and Alchemist.

[Anonymous No.779754]

>300 hours of Blender
>70 hours of Substance Painter
>my UVs still sucks
Will i need to jump to Maya just to make good UV maps?

[Anonymous No.779759]

>>779754
That's nothing. 300 hours is less than a length of a single project of mine.

[Anonymous No.780951]

>>771975
is it true that you can just take photos off of google and edit them to use in games?

[Anonymous No.780960]

>>780951
You can, but they have to be free for a commercial use, so you still can't just download anything.

>implying anyone would notice if you took a small part of someone's photo and edited it in photoshop to use as a texture, but still