Making high-quality image textures

Support Materials and Textures
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Oops. You’re right. Fixed it.

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Hopefully everyone uses OpenEXR for everything.

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OpenEXR for textures? I’ve never seen it but sounds interesting. I have the impression that textures offered on the internet are pretty inconsistent and useless. Still I see albedo values way to high or textures that look like an brightness/contrast node is used on. Even the not free ones. But doesn’t OpenEXR not use a lot of memory. I would like to experiment with it.

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Correct.

EXR would simply be loaded into a 32 bit float buffer, which most folks are rendering using anyways for their offline renders. The upside in quality is huge of course, and under DWAA or DWAB quality 45, the compression is rather significant, in many cases rivalling or bettering that of PNG at 8 bit.

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Thank you! That makes sense.

Is there any way to copy the values from one color ramp to another (other than manually)?

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Thank you, I will take a look at it!

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I’ve seen the thread on BATS, haven’t tried it yet. Sounds like it’s pretty good, how is it for texturing?

I may do that :wink: Thanks for the link.

By the way, welcome to the community!

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Interesting thread and thanks to all who are sharing. :slight_smile:

There are a couple of issues that come to mind.

  1. IMO, any discussion of textures ought to have an understanding with regard to what is the final intended use of the textures? Cycles or EEVEE? Archviz or gaming or other? And very importantly, tileable or not?
  2. If tileable, then at least as important as the image quality is the tiling quality. A high quality image that tiles poorly is of little value to many 3d artists. I have found Photoshop’s offset generally does not work that well for most textures. While substance has sophisticated tiling tools, I prefer the ease of use of PixPlant, plus it is much more affordable.

While PBR is a great materials shader, and works splendidly with unbiased renderers, one should remember realtime PBR engines, like EEVEE, Unity and Unreal, still rely on material and lighting “hacks” to make things look real. Even the most accurate of textures need proper lighting and application.

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I intend to do a number of different projects (time permitting), including ArchViz, games, animations. As for render engines, I’ve only used Cycles up till now, but I want to try others such as EEVEE, Renderman, Radeon ProRender, and game engines.

I would like to do both tileable and non-tileable textures. My understanding is non-tileable textures are good for relatively small objects (eg. leaves, flowers) and tileable textures are good for larger objects like walls, floors, trees, etc. So the two compliment each other.

+1. I think it would be best to use a program like PixPlant or Substance B2M (or Materialize or CrazyBump or AwesomeBump or …)

I imagine it varies with each material, but any “hacks” you wish to share?

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Realtime renderers use a system of lighting and reflection probes, along with screen space and post effects and sometimes deferred rendering pipelines to help simulate reality.

Render artifacts, such as light leaks, GI blotchiness, and difficult to render materials, like glass, are always challenges.

Certainly there are tradeoffs between texture size, and the number of textures per material which also factor into performance.

I would suggest you may consider taking a different approach to material creation for EEVEE than you do for Cycles.

FWIW, you might check out my YouTube channel for my opinions about EEVEE rendering and materials. I also offer a course in understanding how to create photoreal renders with EEVEE. And there are many here, including me, who can give advice once you have a scene setup.

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Anyone knows, if texture caching & tiled openEXR with Blender 2.80 (Cycles or EEVEE) is gonna be supported?

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Thanks for the info!

Off-topic: I looked at “Definitely EEVEE: Definitive Interiors” and it looks useful. A couple questions about it:

  • Are subjects like reflection probes, glass materials, making materials for EEVEE, etc. covered?
  • Does it teach how to avoid render artifacts, light leaks, etc., what to look for, and how to fix it?
  • The product page at Blender Market says “27 video lessons focused on 5 specific points:” and then lists 4 points. What’s number 5?
  • How long will the price be $44? Your thread says it’s only for 3 weeks starting January, but it’s still $44.
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Glad to answer your questions.

  1. Yes, it goes over reflection probes and making materials for EEVEE. You can download my free Glass Shader, along with video demo at https://gum.co/cwGlass

  2. We go over a number of ways to deal with light leaks and how to fix it. The beta testers were very helpful in pushing forth this agenda.

  3. I see from my original script I originally had 5 and reduced it to 4 by combining the simple and importing files, etc part.

  4. I am planning on updating it with a new scene (which is finished) and some other facts about lighting parameters, but have not gotten around to adding those new lessons yet. When I do, I will update the pricing.

I’ve gone ahead and made the changes to the description. Thanks for pointing out the errors.

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I want to come back to this with a little correction:
The offered textured are not only useless, they suck

During this month I tried two products offering materials. Both paid.

It only confirmed what I was thinking. I made a tutorial before, but that got barely attention because I believe it’s quite boring presented (to slow paced).
Old (boring) tutorial: Designing materials in EEVEE - Biggest mistake demystified

Maybe there are some points not correct in the video, but I believe the main idea makes sense. I am planning to make a more up-tempo “tutorial”.
There are other people though way can do that way better than me. (but it seems no-one does).

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It proves that marketing is more important than the quality of the product. They give the game a fancy title, and beautiful looking cover on it. When you play the game it’s just another bouncing square. And yet, they sell over 10k copies of it, giving themself a huge startup capital for other projects. they change the company name, and market something again.

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That is pretty much it.

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It might prove more profitable, to have a quality product to backup the marketing. Giving yourself a reputation. Such companies are Microsoft, game companies, Maya, ZBrush, even blender. Blender even though it’s free opensource, does some type of marketing. And it’s product justifies the marketing.

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I think that in your video you should tell viewers, in the first 10 seconds or so, what you aim to show them. I watched it from start to finish and I’m still not 100% sure what you were trying to tell us. PBR materials should look OK in any lighting. Or rather, they should look correct in any lighting. That might mean building them in a fairly neutral lighting setup, but doesn’t have to. If you have reference images of a material you are trying to recreate using PBR shaders it would make sense to use an environment in Blender that closely matches the one in the reference photo rather than a more neutral one.

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Thanks for feedback on the video. I should indeed make it more fancy and clear.
Here a little correction on your idea “PBR materials should look OK in any lights”:

What if the one who made the material in a lighting setup not realizing how strong that light is. And he adjusted the material instead of the light.
So he thought: Oh the material is a little bit to dark, let’s bump it up. But is was not that the material was to dark. It was that he had barely light in his scene.

So someone that is loading his texture in another scene with bright light. What happens? The material appears now very bright.

Imagine what happens when you have 10 people making materials each in other light conditions. And there is one person importing the materials in a scene. These materials are quite inconsistent qua plausible albdo values.

How to prevent that.
You can prevent that by using a grey card and false colour to understand the lighting conditions in your scene.
If people now make materials, the chance is bigger now that the albedo values are plausible.

If that is not clear, I give up and wish you luck buying textures.
At least there is someone not having that issue that when you add Red plastic metal to the scene that it looks like snow. And that person is me.

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Depending upon chosen reference colourspace.

PBR material response depends on the incoming light colour. In a trichromatic RGB encoding model, that means incoming lights, which are three unique colours. The three chosen reference space lights have an impact both on the values input, but also the resultant output values.