How do many people create textures for their models for sale?

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hello!

I am considering distributing and selling 3D models created in Blender.
These models are not assets to be used only by myself.
Since others will also use them, they need to be safe and not infringe on any third party’s rights, and they need to be of a slightly higher quality.
Therefore, i am interested in how textures are procured by many people who distribute and sell models.
Even if you don’t distribute or sell them, I would be glad to know.

I think many of the textures for non-photorealistic models are hand-drawn.
In this case, do you use Blender’s Texture Paint for hand-drawn textures?
Or do many people use other software such as Substance 3D Painter?

On the other hand, how do they procure the textures for their photorealistic models?
Do they use texture distribution sites such as Poly Heaven?
Or do they use Substance 3D Painter mostly?

Also, if there are any other common ways to procure textures, please let me know.
By the way, I know of procedural textures.

Thanks in advance.
Sorry if there is any strange English.

2

Hi,

I did never buy textures, but only have been downloading them on ambientcg.com, there’s a lot of free high-quality textures up to 8K resolution. There is also HDRi and SBSARs for free.

To create your own texture based on a real one, you would probably need to figure out how to work with Photogrammetry. Here’s a good example of using it:

Here’s a good article on where you may sell your own models:

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Have you looked at this:

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I dont know the exact answer and if I knew, I would have to write a book about how to make textures, the 1000 +1 ways.

Here short list of things you can do: Use texture creation tools for 3D such as mari and substance painter. Depending on the style you aim for, you can also use photoshop, krita, or 2D tools. there are workflows for photoshop that are very powerful. On krita you have a normal tangent brush that many people hate and I love, because it gives me ability to really make styled normals.

For the normal maps, there are tools like materialize which takes a normal image, creates a height map and then normals. You can also use the method of “baking” available both in blender ad substance painter and zbrush. Quality of the normals is insanely high in zbrush.

Some people may also use a photo, then rework it on the PC, make it seamless, then use it tiled.

Some people create maps, that are 1k then tile them so much they become almost infinite resolution.

YOu can bake materials, create procedural materials on the node editors of SP or Blender or theres a godot game asset creator that does it too.

you can create materials in substance designer.

You can create textures also by hand, if you want stylized stuff this is often the way to go.

For each choice you make, you will have to do your own research. As I told you if I knew all the methods I would basically write a book about it.

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Thank you very much for your reply!

I see that it is still common to get the textures from a texture site.
By the way, I knew about that texture site, but the name was changed from CC0Textures.

I am interested in photogrammetry, but it seems to take a bit of courage for me to shoot outdoors.

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I think when selling model in theory you shouldn’t redistribute textures from other websites.
But that depends on the licencing of said textures.
websites like texture.com forbid that, so your model shouldn’t include some of them.

But a workaround I suppose is to bake the textures so you don’t release the texture file, but a transformed version that could work only with your object.

Substance is a great tool, however when working on animation projects where objects might be very close to camera on one shot and very far in the next it’s difficult to evaluate a correct size for textures.
Since there are a lot of objects , it’s very possible to fill the VRAM with all that data, so using substance baked textures on every props wouldn’t work for rendering with eevee or cycles since they don’t have a texture cache.

The other option is to use trimsheets out of substance when that’s possible, or make seamless texture out of it.

My workflow for texturing a set ( where most of objects/textures are) is to use a few seamless PBR textures ( from ambiant CG or poly heaven for instance) and mix them using other grunge textures, or procedural textures. Sometime I use photo based textures too that I touch up in an paint app.
There are great photo based texture websites :

These are not as ready to use as PBR textures but they can be very useful too !

With all that it’s possible to build parametric materials, so I can build one painted metal material and do some variations with it to reduce the material count :

image
image1428×537 129 KB

image
image882×555 113 KB

Same material but different parameters…

I try to reuse as much textures as possible between each materials, since images are shared it will be optimized in memory and I can still get a lot of detail in close-ups.

image
image1268×751 193 KB

image
image1853×985 532 KB

All that allows to keep a reasonable memory footprint :

image
image1822×425 109 KB

These 5 materials are using ~137Mb of memory for these textures, where one 8k image would take 256Mb. And the more material I have, the more reuse I can do…

This saves some space for others assets like character or hero props that are harder to shade with that technique.
I know it’s a bit of topic but since you asked :smiley:

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Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it!

I have checked out that page.
However, perhaps I am a bit timid, but I was a bit reluctant to download textures from texture sites and attach them to models for distribution or sale.

If I watch Blender tutorials on YouTube, I find that many of them use ready-made textures as they are or only process them to the extent of color correction.
On the other hand, I wondered if the creators who are making models for distribution and sale are also using free textures almost as they are in these tutorial videos to make their products.
I was interested to know if they are doing anything special, so I asked the question!

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It really depends on the licencing of the textures. How the original distributor allow you to use their product. Looks like with polyheaven it’s fine !
But in general re-distributing texture is forbidden, this is because if that wasn’t the case you could take a bunch of free available textures on a website and sell them on yours for instance.

Within a 3D model it’s probably not possible either but also less of an issue for obvious reasons.
In the meantime people don’t have the means to check every models so unless you make a best seller product you are probably going to be fine.
I bet if at some point we check these legal issue on all the models that are on sale we would probably find a lot of issues on most of the models. Anyway, it’s great to care of that, at least as a sign of respect to the people who provided these textures !

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I have had a similar experience with seeing the things people produce. Just adding that licensing info to the thread.

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Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it!

I see, everyone has a different way of procuring textures.
I would like to salute the ingenuity of many creators.
By the way, I have never used a Substance Painter, but when I looked up the features I thought they were very good, so I assumed it was common to use a Substance Painter.
On the other hand, I can read from your text that there seems to be a lot that can be done, and my interest is further piqued!

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Thank you very much for your reply!

I feel like your writing is getting to the root of my questions.
However, it seems that I am not at a level where I can understand all of your writing right now.

To summarize your text,
1.It depends on the site whether I can use the textures from the texture site as they are.
2.You are using downloaded textures in combination with other textures.
3.It can change its appearance by parameters, and you are saving memory by reducing the number of textures you use.
I think this is what you are doing.

So my question is,
1.What if I want to use a simple looking material that can be expressed with a single texture, but not a material that looks like a combination of multiple textures?

2.Does this mean that using high-resolution textures on distant objects is a waste of VRAM?

I have never heard of a trim sheet before.
It looks kind of difficult, but I will study it.

I have to go to bed now, so my reply will be delayed.
I’m sorry.

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there are some 2D workflows that are as good as using mari. You can do textures in substance painter as good as mari or in photoshop too. But you have to also have very comfy UV maps.

There are some tutorials on youtube for basically everything. I forgot to mention you can also fire up AI and there are models made purposefully for textures. I use them very often. Tiling textures with AI is another good option.

I also forgot to mention you can use stamps, in substance painter for example. In blender you can produce normal stamps, using workbench and have an unlimited amount of stamps.

The cool thing s that anybody has a method and you wlil invent one yourself at some point. For example I find blender very good at making textures while some people dislike it alot. I also use krita to manualpaint the normals, but most people hate the normal tangent brush

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Hello,

You might find that video quite informative about texturing : https://youtu.be/TkTQhmNFRnY?t=365
They explain trimsheet and different ways of adding details by mixing textures.

Then that’s fine !

Well, first in many software including blender every texture/images needs to be stored in memory in order to be displayed.
It’s not about storing the files , but the pixels values. So even if a 4096x4096 pixels png is 2.5Mb on disk, in memory it will always cost 64Mb.
Most of the time this isn’t an issue, especially for personal projects. But in bigger scenes , all these textures add up and you might need to optimize to avoid filling the memory.

Some software can use a texture cache with different strategies to save memory, but in blender, even if an object take 10pixels in the screen , if it uses a 4k image then it will use 64Mb of memory.
Needless to say that generally a material consist of several maps, so 1 color map, 1 metallic, roughness map, 1 normal map for one material = 64*3 = 192Mb.

So in these case you can start to save memory by reducing overly big images. a 2k image is 4 times smaller than a 4k, so it will took only 16Mb of memory.

But again, it’s getting complicated when doing animation projects, with multiple shots, since you can’t always know how an object will be used. In order to be safe then you need other strategies to save memory.

Anyway, I’m mentioning that mostly since it’s not always known. Many artist’s personal project consist of modeling one character, one vehicle, or one environment but they might not always be used to put several of these character, with several vehicles in a complex environment. In these case optimizations starts to matter and you can’t always stick to the method that individually worked.

But even if your goal is to sell models you don’t have to look into that for your models to be useful.
It’s natural once we buy a model to adapt to the project we are working on, and in many cases anyway it’s simple enough to not fill the vram.

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14

Sorry for the late reply.

It is indeed important to find my own method.
I will try looking up more tutorials on YouTube.
Up until now, I have mainly been looking into modeling, but I feel like I have learned not only the depth of texturing, but also the different types of methods with this question.

Also, I just have one more question,

What is this workbench you are referring to?
It is not a renderer, is it?
I am aware that “stamps” is a method of adding textures on top, just like actually stamping or applying a sticker, but I don’t understand how that relates to the term workbench.
This could be my lack of knowledge, but it could also be a discrepancy caused by my lack of understanding of the English language.

15

Sorry for the late reply.

Thank you for the YouTube link.
However, I am not able to hear English, so I have to rely on the subtitles created by YouTube, which will take some time to learn.
YouTube apparently recognizes Trims as Dream, and I doubt if the other words are correct.
But if I look up the words that come up and the words displayed on the screen, I may be able to understand some of them.

The technique of referencing the vertex color data to the material is a very nice technique that I had seen once.
It is important to select which textures to use, but it is also very important to have a method for how to make use of those textures.

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Ok, indeed it’s better when you understand what they say, in any case, we are talking here about more advanced workflow and generally the textures on model we can buy online are simpler.
simpler = better chances that it’s compatible with different software.
But it’s always good to know different ways of doing !

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