hello everyone
i think this is the right section to post this .
what program you use to make bump , normal and diffuse maps ?
and also i just started at unreal and graphic design and those things .
so how the Textures is done ?
a photo from real life or in a program >
https://www.textures.com/ lots of material there to use
Besides that I use Photoshop a lot, and more recently Substance Painter
Substance Designer to create the textures and Substance Painter to apply them to a model.
Well, if you have Photoshop, Quixel Suite 2 is only 79.00 USD (compared to 140.00) at the moment. I’d say it’s probably comparable to the Substance suite. Probably better if you are already familiar with Photoshop. It depends on your desired workflow I would think.
Substance is much more advanced, for example it keeps track of all of your actions so that if you want to adjust the resolution of your textures you can do that and it’ll just reapply your actions so that you don’t lose any quality by changing the resolution. It also has a ton of painting tools that are very useful. The only thing is that it’s more complex so it takes some work to learn. Substance also has support for many programs where you can make a procedural material and drop that into different software and have it look the same way, in UE4 it can also adjust parameters in real-time, like if you want more dirt on the model you can adjust that within the game.
Photoshop optionally with Quixel. Substance is neat, but I dislike the lack of direct control, and I’ve seen far too many new (and not so new) artists using it as a crutch because it’s so easy to select a material, drop it on a model, change a few sliders, and think they’re done.
This is an old tutorial, and while the workflow is from before PBR was a common thing, it covers a lot.
If you can get the results you want easily then it’s not a crutch, it’s just a new tool. I haven’t seen anything about a lack of control in Substance, if anything it has too much control which can be overwhelming.
If the results people want are a literally dragged and dropped material with little to no actual texturing work or thought put in then they’re not setting their sights high enough.
This isn’t a problem specifically with Substance, it’s a very cool program with a lot of potential, but the unfortunate result of its popularity is that now a lot of people who would otherwise be going and finding tutorials like the one I linked that explain the mindset and execution behind creating compelling textures now just download Substance instead, drag and drop some materials on, and don’t take it any further because they don’t know any better.
Unless they’ve added in literal Photoshop to Substance in the year since I’ve tried it, it still doesn’t compare to being able to go into your texture image and manipulate it exactly the way you want in moments.
That’s really judgemental, just because software has advanced so that you don’t have to do things as difficult as they used to be doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use the tool, if you don’t work to learn new tools then you’ll just be left behind because people are using the software to do things more realistically and faster than they used to have to be done.
You can do exactly that with Substance Painter, paint directly onto the model or paint on the 2D texture. I don’t know of anything that Quixel can do that Substance can’t.
You’re missing my point. The point is not that tedious things are now quick and easy through Quixel/Substance, that’s great, the point is that important technical knowledge about how textures and materials work is now missing because of the simplicity of the tools offering inexperienced artists a crutch to skip all that knowledge and still produce something that doesn’t look horrid.
I mean manipulate as in literal image manipulation. AKA, that thing Photoshop is built for.
That’s not a problem, if it does what you need it to then you don’t need to know the reasoning behind it, and it’s not like Quixel isn’t meant to do the same thing. If a new software feature did perfect 3D topology automatically then I wouldn’t miss having to know how to make good topology.
Substance can do everything Photoshop can that’s relevant to making textures
With Substance Designer, you can also scan real-life textures.
Krita Paint is a free software but very good.
I mainly use Substance Painter to add materials to my 3D models. Most materials and textures that I need are already in the software, but if I don’t find what I need right away, I usually go looking at Substance Share and Source. If I don’t find what I need there, I search places like textures.com and other texture sites, or wherever that I can find textures, really. But I always find a way to get the textures that I need, so I haven’t ever bothered to try and make my own textures from scratch. If you would like to add materials to 3D models, then I would highly recommend to get your hands on Substance software, I pay the monthly fee and get all their software, and access to Substance Source and Share. I have never enjoyed the texturing/material process, but Substance Painter has made my workflow a lot easier, and now after using it for a while, I actually enjoy it the most. Using it is like “adding a cherry on top of the cake” after I finish modeling:D
For making normals and other maps out of diffuse i use either some artist (pay them for work), or for prototyping i use crazy bump, fliter forge, substance painter, pixlogic, houdini.
Crazy bump and filter forge to make basic texture kind of mockup, to have idea where is wood metal etc.
Then i make meshes in houdini, uv map them and export to substance painter.
In substance painter i refine skin, make material masks.
Then mesh with skin waits for artists (somewhere in future) to make final pass, apply real textures (not those **** ones from filter forge).
For now (prototyping) those models with generated textures are good enough.
For Normal, AO baking is Toolbag 3 the actually best, its simple fast accurate. I can say this why i has used Shadermap, XNormal, KNALD and others but best and fastest result with Marmoset Toolbag 3. For prototype texturing Quixel DDO and NDO and some special things in Substance. Choose the solution with most possibilieties, for example i have plugins for substance they can do normal welds and stitches very easy.
I purchased knald because xnormal wasn’t doing the trick with curvature maps, and sure enough it’s pretty inconsistent with results too. Anyone know of another reliable tool for curvature maps?
For sure Toolbag 3 too! And no need for caging in 3d modelling solution or Baker only use your lowpoly adjust abit and done.
With Knald i getting often strange things not handle(has used before buy by a friend) and the caging with 3 meshes is strange a think.
I’ll give it a go then. Yeah Knald has a lot of issues when it comes to accuracy. And as you mentioned the way they handle cages is pretty strange. Thanks. =)
Just wanted to follow up, Toolbag 3 makes the best curvature maps out of all the programs I’ve tried. Thanks for the heads up. =)