I’m curious about how you handle textures and materials in your workflow. Do you purchase a lot of textures and materials, or do you prefer creating them yourself? Have you started using AI tools for this purpose as well?
Additionally, how easy (or difficult) do you find it to discover high-quality online textures and materials that suit your projects?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and experiences
How do you primarily approach textures and materials in your workflow?
I create everything from scratch.
I use free, pre-made textures and materials.
I purchase professional textures and materials.
I use AI tools to generate textures.
I mix different methods depending on the project.
I often struggle to find suitable textures and end up creating my own.
0voters
Personally, I often spend a lot of time searching for highly detailed textures, especially in the micro-detail range. Since I frequently work on high-end product renderings for my clients, I need ultra-high-resolution textures—for example, wood surfaces. However, when I’m creating an 8K product rendering, the wooden floor it’s placed on needs to match the same level of detail and realism as the product itself. More often than not, I end up creating these textures from scratch
I would say finding and creating a texture aren’t mutually exclusive. You can use an image texture you found and mix it with procedural textures. or you can blend between multiple textures on the same object. If you know what you are doing, you can start from a relatively low quality image and generate roughness and bump maps from it, or AI upscale a low resolution image into something better.
A finished set of texture for an object could contain procedural, hand painted and photo elements all mixed together. I think it’s best to know multiple ways and how each can help you.
I mostly pre-made stuff, either free images that I then build up the shader around, or community stuff for Substance Painter.
I’ve only just recently installed Comfy UI and started playing around with AI image stuff, so not done any textures yet, but that is something I’ll have a look into. Tho if its anything like my experience so far in playing around with AI image generation, it’s very easy to get some ‘flashy’ image that once you know what AI can do, it looks very AI.
But as soon as you want more control, to art direct, etc then getting AI to generate what you actually want is much harder.
