as always I see great artists here, posting their great work. And I am always blown away from that perfection in texturing, materializing, lighting, etc, e.g. little cute characters, monsters, etc.
Currently I am working (trying) on a cute character (a monster) by myself and was wondering what the best practice is in applying materials to it. I always want to learn something new, something in addition, and of course especially when it’s obviously a pretty simple thing, which turns out it’s difficult and not that easy. … And I am sure, there must be a more easier and “righter” way to do it, which I don’t know yet:
Applying different materials to a single mesh.
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Let’s say I created a character from a remesh and sculpted it, so that I am happy with it… (For this example I am using a human male base mesh.)
Is that, to combine different materials via masks, really a good idea and best practice to apply materials to a single mesh ? Or is there a good and better way ?
Thanks in advance for answering and sharing some other ideas to handle this.
Having multiple shaders per character isn’t the best for performance. The better practice will be painting grayscale texture masks to control parameters of a single Principled shader (specular, roughness, metallicity and so on)
Nice idea… (but you might want to use vertex colors to mix the maps and ) maybe a bit overthinking ?? (until you get better results than others ):
Your approach to mix the materials by a some “part membership” might be nice… but to be “perfect” for this the painting has to be done on both overlapping parts aka maps… and i’m not sure if this is directly possible with blender…
Of course iIt would be perfect to have the same “figure” on both sides of the UV islands of the two parts diverted by a seam… (maybe only rotated by 90 degree steps) . But this is not always possible. It also would be nice, with a decent texture density presupposed, to have the same “length” of edges on those seams to not “glitch”… again not always possible.
So the pixels on the texture does not alwasy fit perfectly. The higher the imagesize the higher the density and so less visible possible “seam glitches”. To be able to paint the texture in 3D helps because it is like painting on some figure in real live… you simply rotate for the best view… but in real live there a “direct” mapping. Some artist use higher texture density for painting and then scale them down… others disadvise this because the resul differs from the work done and only (good) results do count aka gets you paid ( but… see winking smiley above).
So most artists i saw do overcome this buy making seams at positions which are almost invisible… because people tend to wear clothes
Remember: you do not have to model (or paint) what you do not see.
Maybe performance is a thing to think about… But you can create the materials like my way, with different shades, and bake the materials into files, then using the files afterwards. I don’t think that counts… I’m just thinking about a different way to put the materials on the faces where they have to be… And painting vertex mask and using them in the shading takes a lot of time.
Let’s take a currently previous posted object … The Protector Homelander … If you habe one sculpted mesh, how would you put materials on it ?
There is no significantly easier way to do it I’m afraid. You can literally apply different materials on selected faces in Edit mode, but it’ll be restricted by mesh resolution, and also will require you to jump between materials to edit their parameters, so less efficient than what you already doing. You can also use texture maps as masks: can result in better quality transitions, but will need UV coordinates.
To create a material for character like you said, first I’d create masks for its individual features, like skin and clothing. Similar way as you do, only with image texture instead of vertex colors. Then, I can mix any type of parameter, such as color or specular intensity, based on these masks. So the material can be edited non-destructively
Thank a lot, I’ll keep this in mind and will do some further research, and additional tests. With my solution of vertex paiting and masking and so on, I am doing well right now… But, as i said, I just want to learn some additional stuff.
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