I’m finally going to get my hands on this. Can’t wait to tear it apart and see how they are doing it. Alas, I’m betting they are leaning on DX11 a lot which means it probably won’t look nearly as good on a Mac. Still, either way it will be educational, no? Cheers,
J^2
I see theses are finally on the market place. before I think about buying this pack could I see what they look like on a landscape or where the textures are tiled together… the pictures look good but they don’t really show anything.
Very nice textures but it’s a pity that they come only in 2K resolution.
There are only maybe 20% People out there who have a PC wich can handle the full 4K power of those material in realtime XD
2K is perfect!
aha just 20% of all users have a need for 4K textures? Very interesting… I even don’t ask how you come up with this number, cause it refelcts for sure only your feeling and has nothing to do with the real facts. Sorry no offense to you!
Believe me, the need for 4K is there, quixel will offer even 8K textures. And since Ultra HD is becoming more and more populate this days, there is also a need for higher resolution textures. How ever 2K is of course the standard resolution and will be ok for the most of users. So i repeat my self again 
It’s a pitty that they don’t come in 4K…
4k texture resolution is the minimum resolution for up-close in VR. Anything below that looks pixelated and “not good” imo.
I havent tried it yet, but I think 8k texture would be best for quality VR. Of course, we are still ~5 years out before high-end gaming PC’s could handle that.
8K textures will look fantastic for sure, but i think also it is like not really possible to use a lot of 8K textures in current games or what ever.
I completely agree with you; that’s why I said that we’re still about 5 years out.
If anyone has the pack, could they post a picture of some of the textures tiled together?
Hi everyone! Apologies for the lack of updates and slow release. We were in the process of a big move and experienced some down time as a result. Should not be an issue moving forward.
Now for some answers to some questions!
We’ll see what we can do about getting them onto a landscape for demonstration. Please remember that this is primarily a high quality texture set with example materials. In order to get the most out of them, and to make them look natural, users will need to blend them together using layered materials when applying the textures to larger landscape surfaces.
We are looking at making some future batches up to 4k, but it is important to note that texel density is entirely dependent on the surface area of the geometry and tiling rate of the texture. Standard ‘next-gen’ texel density for console and most PC games is still sitting around 5 pixels per cm surface area in game (this may go up to 8 pixels per cm for a first person camera type or high end PC), which translates to 1 x 512 texture per 1 meter of in-game surface area. In other words, a 4 k texture would need to be tiled only once across an 8 meter by 8 meter surface to maintain said density. This may be necessary for certain surface types that require large scale details that can not be seen to be repeating (like large rock or cliff faces for instance), but most natural surfaces (trees, grass, and dirt for instance) do not usually require more than a 4 meter x 4 meter patch because the surface itself is either smaller than that, or the tiling can be broken up by blending different materials together (dirt and grass for instance). The goal with these specific textures would be to tile them sufficiently across a surface in order to achieve the desired texel density, and then get the surface variety through blending the textures together.
See explanation above. But basically, you can get any resolution you want using any texture size you want with the right tiling rate. The key is simply to break up the tiling using other clever techniques. I’ve seen next-gen FPS weapons textured using nothing but 256 textures that were tiled like crazy and then blended together with a 0-1 mapped black and white mask to get the detail and context. Epic themselves use this technique in the recent Unreal Tournament maps, and I’m sure you’ll agree that the results look phenomenal.
Future batches… does this mean there is a you will update the current surface pack to 4K ?
Unfortunately that is not possible due to the methodology of the capture technology. Final resolution needs to be planned during the capture phase of production, and impacts a number of factors (most notably processing time). In short, upresing past submissions would constitute a total redo.
On a side note, our team all work day jobs on current-gen AAA console/ PC games, and when it came time to decide what our final resolutions would be it was a unanimous consensus that even AAA titles rarely use 4k textures in production (less than 5% of the time in our experience). You may see 4k textures in demos like the recent Star Wars: Battlefront or Unreal Kite demo, but they rarely (if ever) make it into a final production release. As such, we made the decision that 2k was sufficient for production applications. As we continue to see a high demand for larger sizes, we will reevaluate our process to allow for up to 4k resolutions. Perhaps even 8k for surfaces that warrant it (large cliff faces etc). Smaller surfaces (like fabrics or tree bark) will likely still be released in smaller texture sizes, since it would just not be logical or efficient to apply a 4 or 8k texture to such a small surface area.
But for the tiling…
I finally got around to picking this pack up, and while the visual quality is indeed high, the tiling is rather poor. Even at 5x5, you can see repetition artifacts. Were these materials tested for tiling at all? Example:
You can see it fairly clearly. And this is just at 5x5. To use this on a landscape you’d be talking about repeats in the hundreds. When I crank it up to just 50x50:
I know you’d want to blend with other materials for proper usage, but you’d still want to cover a decent amount of area. I was hoping to make a large grassy field with these. That doesn’t seem doable with the tiling the way it is.
Again, other then the tiling, the materials are quite nice. But since one of the primary things most people will want to use these on is landscapes, good tiling is a must, and that’s just not here unfortunately. Any of a touch up to fix the tiling? Cheers,
J^2
Yes they were, naturally. In our experience, however, you would never apply a grass texture to a large landscape that was not also covered with grass meshes, trees, rocks, and blended with other grass and dirt textures. Additionally, one would usually be down at ground level, and if it was necessary to have a far off vista, or aerial gameplay, other techniques would be necessary to mask tiling, such as fading between different tiling rates from up close and far away, or using a macro color map to add variation to the diffuse surface from a distance.
We could certainly revisit the tiling for the textures that would need to be used on large terrain surfaces, like grass, but please keep in mind that in order to remove ‘all’ tiling, one would necessarily need to remove ‘all’ detail. Given the choice between the two evils, it has been our experience that most production teams choose to have ‘a little’ tiling repetition (and associated detail), and then mask it with the following techniques:
To illustrate: The top row of textures in the image below are from the Unreal Kite Demo, applied to a flat plane with no other methods used. The second row are textures from the Nature Materials content pack. You’ll notice that the textures from the Kite Demo are no better in the quality of tiling when assessed in this manner.
Now, in the following images, the so called ‘bad tiling’ of the Kite Demo textures are not noticeable because the artists who created the demo used a variety of techniques similar to the ones described above in order to mask the ‘bad tiling’ and create a natural and believable composition.
Would you be open to trying some of these techniques first and seeing how they work for you?
Excellent response. 11/10.
What he said 
Sorry to harp on this, and I’m not trying to bag or your product or show it in a negative light and I understand that there will be tiling with all textures, but could you show the all the martials/ textures up-close e.g. First person view with some type of tiling. I really want to see the affect of it, my concern was that they where too detail for a “open World” type uses. that’s not to say they cant be used in other ways of cores. or a wouldn’t buy then as well.
Just for a quick test, here is the Kite Open World turntable with all textures (ground, tree bark, dead leaves etc) swapped for Real Surfaces ones, except for live tree leaves and unique rock/grass meshes.
Again, I am not stating the materials are of inferior quality or poorly thought out/produced. I’m merely stating that for my rather specific use case they aren’t where I would need them to be and was a little disappointed in that fact. I’m fully willing to accept that it’s more on me for hoping I could use these in a case that they weren’t primarily intended for then to imply any lack of skill or quality on your part. And since I had actually plunked the cash down, I felt I should inform anyone else who was considering also purchasing this pack to be sure of their own use case before doing so. As you have proven with the above post, the materials are obviously perfectly suited to the usage demonstrated. I will just have to keep looking for a more appropriate solution for my project. Cheers,
J^2
Sorry to hear that you are disappointed in the content. Of course we value your business highly, and are not at all trying to disprove your statements one way or the other. Our goal with the above response was simply to clarify that at least ‘some’ tiling is necessary in order to maintain a sufficient level of detail within any texture, and perhaps more importantly, to (hopefully) offer some potential solutions to the perceived problem of visible tiling within large landscape surfaces, so that you might still get the full value out of your purchase.
Similarly, it is our hope that potential future users might read this and see how the textures can be tailored to their own specific use cases by applying some of the techniques described above, instead of missing out on the high value that we offer due to unnecessary concerns.
Regarding the issue of needing to keep looking for a more appropriate solution, we still maintain that our textures should be perfectly suited for nearly any realistic art style, and unless your project is overly stylized, should be perfectly appropriate for your project too. But only when used in conjunction with some of the above mentioned techniques. If, however, your intention is to apply the textures to a very large landscape surface without using any of the above mentioned techniques to mask the tiling, then I fear it may prove extremely challenging (if not impossible) to find the more appropriate solution that you are looking for without sacrificing most of your detail in the process.
We like to think of a good texture like a good sword. Even the most expertly crafted weapon can only be as effective as the techniques that it is used with.
Best!
-RS Team
