Meet Poliigon, the next logical step in Texture library evolution

[fdfxd]

EDIT: I’ve remade the thread to be a bit more detailed from the get go, also made a clickbait-ish title to match with the clickbait-ish marketing, also made it have a real structure!

What the heck Poliigon?

Poliigon is a texture site that took the concept of Megascansand Notextures then ran with it.
Essentially it’s a texturing site works a lot like episcura and textures, there’s a twist , the textures come with Normal,Albedo,Specular and Diffuse maps. While Megascans and Notextures certainly did come up with this concept before Andrew price came up with Poliigon,

Unlike Megascams ( )

It actually released in my lifetime

And unlike Notextures(fitting name for a site with a scarcity of textures),

it actually has more than 2 textures

Why should I care?

Well if you are new to 3D or, don’t have a copy of Crazybump,Bitmap2Materialor you can’t use awesomebump,

this sort of stuff can really be helpful to you.
It can really boost the quality of the materials.

Marketing buzzwords aside, normal maps and specular maps are great for raising the quality level of your scene, whether it’s Stylized or Photorealistic. A material library full of them is very welcome to the CG industry

HAH! This is a tool for mere 3rd estate preset plebeians! Surely my advanced knowledge of Substance designer will trump what ever this NOOOOB website has to offer!

Well for the most part what you say is true, for the most part,
I mean in post #7 Esmiaco has demonstrated the limitations of image based textures.
Substance designer is procedural, it doesn’t suffer from that.

But you simply can’t deny how valuable a library full of PBR textures would be!

How much does it cost?

It’s for the low low price of… 599 USD, nah just kidding it’s 17$ a month. However you do get a free trial.

Remember how I said it’s like CG textures earlier? You can download 25 textures a day in a standard paid account, free users can get 1k versions of all textures, free of charge.

Bold move from Andrew Price.
And a smart one…

So what else is there?

Well there are more features, I encourage you to read the article in Blender Guru’s website, as it stands there are

1. Patterns
2. Alpha masked trees
3. “Designs” or decals as the big boys call it
4. “”""“Next gen”"""" overlays
5. And maybe more?

Things to note

1. If you are a bad artist, this isn’t magically going to make your art better, don’t expect too much
2. It’s not a 100% free for very obvious reasons
3. They’re image textures, not procedural ones

Now for my beef with AP’s marketing…

Hey Andrew, Love your products(As in the tutorials and podcasts, though the Architecture academy looks nice)

But for the love of god please stop with the buzzwords,
It puts people off more than it attracts them.

“Next gen” is meaningless

“Other texture sites vs Poliigon textures” reminds me of one of Dave Chappelle’s skits where there’s a fake commercial that compares butter to soap on terms of longevity(wish I had a link)

Look at how your employee, Reynante Martinez, markets his mat pack, you should probably do the same(except the part where he posts about it every 5 mins on the facebook wall, that was um… kinda annoying.)

[fdfxd]

Can’t correct the grammatical error of the title, for some reason it’s not allowing me to save my edits

[Hoverkraft]

Calling this a PBR library is misleading. It supports neither a metalness nor a specularity workflow and simply mixing a diffuse and glossy shader (like in the tutorial) is not a PBR principled workflow.

[fdfxd]

@Hover

Calling overlays “next gen” is also misleading
a lot of things about how he’s marketing this is misleading.

Still a great product however

[BeerBaron]

@Hoverkraft

Calling this a PBR library is misleading. It supports neither a metalness nor a specularity workflow and simply mixing a diffuse and glossy shader (like in the tutorial) is not a PBR principled workflow.

What is that supposed to mean? These maps are fine for use in PBR materials. It’s a site for textures, not for finished materials.

Mixing diffuse and glossy shaders is how you reproduce the “standard” PBR materials from other renderers in Cycles. I think you’re mistaking “PBR workflow” with using some PBR Ubershader. That’s not how it works in Cycles, you have to mix your BSDFs (all of which are physically-based) yourself instead of having a predefined Ubershader do it for you.

“Metalness” is just a shortcut for mixing a “coated glossy” (diffuse/glossy mix) with a glossy BSDF. You don’t really need that unless you have textures coming out of an application that bakes all the material info into one set of textures. Otherwise, it’s more convenient to just design two materials and mix those together.

[Hoverkraft]

Of course, if you break it down then it always comes down to mixing basic shaders. And Cycles BSDFs are physically-based.

For me a “PBR Texture” implicates using one of the more or less standardized workflows (specular / metalness) and for this to work in Cycles you need an uber shader, at least something more involved than mixing a glossy and a diffuse via a black and white map. In most PBR shaders I’ve seen the interaction between rough glossy / diffuse towards the edges (fresnel) is also a bit more involved, I believe, so it’s not just a single straight mix.

I think our difference of interpretation lies in the fact that PBR means “physically based rendering”, which is how most render engines and their BSDF models work nowadays, whereas to me it means a workflow which makes shading standardized and transportable between applications.

In your interpretation any texture would be a PBR texture as long it is fed into a pyhsically based BSDF, is that correct?

[esimacio]

Very nice product, but I am not sure what Andrew put in the term " seamless" , because the one I tried was not. Judge your self.

Attachments

[Joel_nl]

@esimacio

Very nice product, but I am not sure what Andrew put in the term " seamless" , because the one I tried was not. Judge your self.

What seems to be the problem?
I see no seams, only tiling.

Every texture, not matter how well it’s made will still have this effect.
try painting a mask on this surface and use the mask to blend a similar looking texture into it. this will break up the tiling (which of course in your example is set way to high)

[ndee]

@esimacio
seamless doesn’t mean you won’t see any repetitive patterns. As soon as you have any sort of patterns you will see that they repeat. Otherwise you need to have a very noisy image which will not work vor every texture type.
If you scale seamless textures down alot, almost any texture will show its pattern. It is just in its nature.

You will need to scale up the texture and maybe blend some other textures with a stencil map. This will break the pattern to some degree.

EDIT
@blaize
hehe… same thought ^^
Didn’t see you have answered already.

[zeealpal]

@Hoverkraft

Of course, if you break it down then it always comes down to mixing basic shaders. And Cycles BSDFs are physically-based.

In your interpretation any texture would be a PBR texture as long it is fed into a pyhsically based BSDF, is that correct?

Basically, presuming the textures are correctly created for mixing physically based BSDF’s

Here’s an example using the basic glossy material from LuxRender (which has a few more options), and one of the substance default metal material(I only just downloaded it then). Just a basic scene and sun lamp, using a Cycles node would not be that hard, simply mix in an extra matte/glossy mix.

Attachments

[esimacio]

@ndee

@esimacio
seamless doesn’t mean you won’t see any repetitive patterns. As soon as you have any sort of patterns you will see that they repeat. Otherwise you need to have a very noisy image which will not work vor every texture type.
If you scale seamless textures down alot, almost any texture will show its pattern. It is just in its nature.

You will need to scale up the texture and maybe blend some other textures with a stencil map. This will break the pattern to some degree.

EDIT
@blaize
hehe… same thought ^^
Didn’t see you have answered already.

Thank you for clearing this up, I checked in photoshop and it has no seam. I mixed this up with “tileless” but probably there are no such thing, so mixing it shall be. And also I apoligize to Andrew.

[fdfxd]

@Esi

It’s an image texture, not a substance texture

of course it’s going to show some obvious tiling

[Hoverkraft]

@zeealpal

Basically, presuming the textures are correctly created for mixing physically based BSDF’s

What is the correct way to create them? How are these supposedly correctly created (for example) 8 bit b/w textures different from any other 8 bit b/w texture?

Any texture can drive a mix node. The result has to be meaningful. This texture library, as far as I can see, does not provide for predictable results. It’s no different to pushing any image trough one of the countless texture generators (Knald etc) and it is up to the user to balance the results.

If it would provide for a PBR workflow (which would necessitate an uber node) you could plug those textures in an UE4 or Unity PBR shader and have similar results. And that’s what PBR means to me. Now you can discuss semantics if “Physically Based Rendering” was a good name for this entire concpept, given that it originated in realtime graphics, introducing for example energy conservation, when offline rendering had this years before.

[zeealpal]

@Hoverkraft

What is the correct way to create them? How are these supposedly correctly created (for example) 8 bit b/w textures different from any other 8 bit b/w texture?

Any texture can drive a mix node. The result has to be meaningful. This texture library, as far as I can see, does not provide for predictable results. It’s no different to pushing any image trough one of the countless texture generators (Knald etc) and it is up to the user to balance the results.

If it would provide for a PBR workflow (which would necessitate an uber node) you could plug those textures in an UE4 or Unity PBR shader and have similar results. And that’s what PBR means to me. Now you can discuss semantics if “Physically Based Rendering” was a good name for this entire concpept, given that it originated in realtime graphics, introducing for example energy conservation, when offline rendering had this years before.

Havent looked at the Poliigon library your referencing but of course your right, pushing a texture through normal, spec, roughness generators is not guaranteed to get you ‘pbr’ useful textures.

I was saying that any texture can be put into a ‘pbr’ shader, and it doesn’t have to be an ubershader, they just make it easier to do. Just because any texture can be, doesn’t mean you’ll get the results you want. You would need a texture that has values that are physically based/plausible. You should be able to plug the textures in my example into a PBR node (there was also a metalness, height, AO and raw colour map) in unity or similar.

I don’t we really disagree on this, you were just saying that ‘this’ texture library doesn’t appear to provide predictable results, I’m saying I never said it did?

[ndee]

I don’t want to rate the product or discredit any of his work. I think this textures absolultely have a value. Still this is nothing special. This are just normal textures that you can find on so many sites if you pay for them. But even free you will find many.

I really don’t like the taste of the marketing of andrews products. The end user is somehow treated as if he is stupid and especially user that are not so experienced are tricked here. On the one side he showcases the most worse result that can be achieved with a simple texture and on the other side the best with a combination of all together. I know this is something companies do if they are marketing their products, but he is also a well known tutor which gives him some sort of responsibility for his students which seem also to be his clients. A pro will know the benefits of such services and textures, but a newcomer?

I mean take a look at this picture. This is only one texture which can also give a fairly good result(its setup in seconds). You can use this one texture also for reflections and for normal mapping.

Don’t get this post wrong. Hopefully he has success with this service. It seems his team has put a lot of work into it. I just would love to have a more honest marketing from his side. This is keeping me away from his products.

Attachments

[Hoverkraft]

@zeealpal

I don’t we really disagree on this, you were just saying that ‘this’ texture library doesn’t appear to provide predictable results, I’m saying I never said it did?

Yes, seems we agree on this point.

Like the guy above me said, it’s a nice texture library but the whole PBR reference seems like a tacked-on buzzword. I exclusively use a PBR workflow because the stuff I produce often times gets used in both realtime and offline rendering and so I was excited to have a resource for this, similar to Quixel Suite or Megascans (should that ever happen). Turns out that’s not what this library is about.

[Cyaoeu]

This doesn’t seem like a great deal to me when you can get Substance Live for basically the same price. (with tons of free materials/smart materials that are truly PBR)

[comeinandburn]

@ndee

I really don’t like the taste of the marketing…

This is the plague of our times, basically just a less offensive word than Propaganda or Deception.

[SterlingRoth]

@ndee

I really don’t like the taste of the marketing of andrews products. The end user is somehow treated as if he is stupid and especially user that are not so experienced are tricked here. On the one side he showcases the most worse result that can be achieved with a simple texture and on the other side the best with a combination of all together. I know this is something companies do if they are marketing their products, but he is also a well known tutor which gives him some sort of responsibility for his students which seem also to be his clients. A pro will know the benefits of such services and textures, but a newcomer?

…

Don’t get this post wrong. Hopefully he has success with this service. It seems his team has put a lot of work into it. I just would love to have a more honest marketing from his side. This is keeping me away from his products.

Andrew Price doesn’t make money off of people who know what they are doing. He makes his money off of people who don’t have a clue. When he was selling tuturials, that made sense(if you don’t know what you are doing, you could probably use a tutorial), but if he is trying to provide assets to professionals, he needs to start assuming his customers aren’t dumbasses.

[NinthJake]

Andrew always uses a lot of buzzwords to hype up his products, even if it doesn’t always make a lot of sense. I have complained about it ever since he started selling stuff.

Even so, as far as texture libraries go, this looks actually really good. Regardless of being “PBR ready” or not.