Hi everyone! Posting over here to let you know that our first content pack, 20 AAA PBR Brick and Wall Surfaces has been submitted to the Trello boards. Please stop by and give it a vote if you like what you see and want it up on the Marketplace sooner.
A little bit about the package:
Contains 20 legitimately AAA quality texture sets that would normally take a seasoned artist 2-3 days to create (and cost a developer hundreds of dollars in the process). We will be selling them at $1.25 each ($25.00 for the whole package).
Each surface is super high resolution and has been physically scanned from life for both diffuse and surface bump information. This means that the albedo, normal and height maps are true ‘PBR’ because they have been baked down from high resolution scanned geometry, instead of being converted from a photograph or sculpted by hand, which tends to produce unrealistic results.
Each surface is then painstakingly tiled in all directions and rid of any noticeable repetition using proven AAA production techniques, and all additional PBR maps are hand authored using measured real world data, including Albedo/diffuse, Normal, Roughness/Microsurface, Specular, Ao, and Height/Parallax maps.
All packages include a test scene complete with all necessary Parent materials and material instances.
Here are a few more images to give you an idea of the variety and quality:
Please vote and comment to let us know what you think! Our next pack is going to be Nature (Trees, moss, rocks, soil, grass etc), but why not tell us what other themes you could benefit from?
Here are some ideas we’re either already working on or plan to soon:
Since all of our surfaces are scanned from life on location, doing 17th century sandstone brick will require us to locate the appropriate 17th century wall and travel to that location to acquire the appropriate data. Not saying that isn’t planned (in fact it is), but it’s still somewhat down the list right now:)
Thanks for the recommendation! Since all of our surfaces are scanned from life, however, I’m afraid anything purely fictional is rather outside of our range of focus. Our goal is to provide affordable AAA quality materials in real-world PBR vein of content.
That said, all Sci-fi must be grounded in reality to be relatable (former Dead Space dev here), so any of our man-made surfaces (metals, upholstery, plastics, rubbers etc) would be highly useful in creating realistic/ believable sci-fi modules.
To bring our conversation from the old thread (now removed):
I think I will be buying your nature material pack regardless of any edits you might make to workflow, but I would **greatly **benefit from some layering of a second/third material for z-blending and/or vertex blending (snow, moss, wet, rust, paint, blood etc.) So much that when I do inevitably buy your nature pack, if it doesn’t come with that functionality, I’ll be setting it up myself. There’s simply too much flexibility loss in an overall scene to not stack those materials - at least for a project like mine where the environment is highly immersive and attempts to react logically to weather/time/players.
Of course it doesn’t make sense for every material, but it should make sense for most all materials. No real-world material is ever naturally perfect and constantly separate from things that could rest/gather on top of it. Everything decays eventually
As for material type suggestions - I might also look at packaging entire scene concepts in addition to grouping by material types. It might spur some purchases from people who are interested in building out entire concepts rather than needing to figure out where they’d use your materials. Here’s some examples:
Beach:
Deadwood (washed up)
Sand
Ocean Water
Shells
Aquatic Plant Life
Rocky Sand (pebbles from tide lines)
Wooden Dock & Boat:
Different Types of Wood
Rope
Canvas
Rusted Metals
Tavern:
Candle
Metal Cups/Pots
Plates (Wooden and/or glass)
Wood for the architecture
Cushions
Knives/Forks/Spoons/Etc.
Decorations
Foods of various types (fresh/cooked)
These three are off the top of my head, and I could think of hundreds more scenes without much effort (including those that don’t follow the trends I’ve described with these three listed above).
Sorry bout that! The original was accidentally posted from one of our artists’ personal accounts instead of the main one, so we had to repost. Won’t happen again:)
We’ll look into building that functionality into the parent materials with the option to blend at least one additional material on top of the base, and have the option to use either Z projection with a falloff slider or vertex color to drive the blend, as some surfaces lend themselves best to one method over the other (for example, if you want to layer snow on top of rocks, then Z projection is the most likely the appropriate solution, while vertex blending is better suited for layering something like plaster and brick). We can also look into having the options available for the Z projection falloff be modulated by the normal map detail, and the vertex blend falloff be driven/modulated by the heightmap detail or an external detail map (height would work best for large scale details like bricks, while an external map would be best for adding additional detail to a flatter blend like chipped paint on metal).
Not a bad idea at all! And something we can certainly look into as our library expands. Thanks!
Those materials look so good. I see you are using photogrammetry for making your textures. Can you describe your workflow a bit more, how do you get such a good normal map out and height…, much appreciated, and of course voted on trello, thanks.
