Deus Siddis wrote:chuck_starchaser wrote:klauss wrote:
I just wanted to note that that (texturing first with bogus solid colors to separate one material from the other) is a tried and true texturing technique. The idea is to get a preliminar texture so you can see how the material separation goes and if it makes sense/looks well/unwraps well, and then you send that base texture to some artist (or do it yourself) that does the final texturing job.
Exactly. What I do is assign my diffuse and specular colors inside blender, bake them, test them, fix them, try again.
And those bakes are a mighty good way to get started on the texturing.
A similar technique that can sometimes be useful to save time and better hide seams is to create one or more procedural textures for a model and then bake them to create the base detail layer for the final diffuse/specular textures.
One of us (at PU), Dual Joe, he was proposing using procedurals for metal. He even got out his camera and went on a field trip taking snapshots of metals. But this didn't pan out. Why? Because metals don't really *have* texture. Sure, you can get rust, or scratches, or dirt. Well, in space you don't get rust, but forgetting that...
Anyways, the kinds of "texture" we're talking about for metals only exists at very close range --arm's length. From 100 meters away you don't see the little scratches and stuff. To represent stainless steel on a space ship, all you need is black in diffuse, 60% gray in specular, and low shininess. Done! Well, if you want to get dirty, you can sprinkle a bit of perlin noise onto the shininess. That, in fact, is what makes the surface of the engines on the Tarsus look somewhat irregular. I actually put a bit of noise in the specular, which gets amplified by the shader when it computes shininess from specular.
Same goes for paint. Paint doesn't have "texture"; it just has color.
What I do is add dirt streaks trailing from bumps and grooves and features. And I add a bit of rust, and a bit of scratches and stuff. Done!
When you over-do it with the texture, the texture looks over-done
90% of good texturing is getting the materials right. The rest is icing on the cake. A gorgeous texture without proper materials is like dressing a ship in a beautiful pajamas, but a pajamas anyhow. If you want a ship to look real, you need to put real materials on it.
If you look at a lot of space sims out there, you'll find that the ships look like toys made of paper and plastic. Why? Paper comes from the undue emphasis on the diffuse texture. The emphasis should be on the specular and the shininess; but people always start with diffuse.
The plastic comes from the common but terribly false belief that you can produce a specular texture by desaturating the diffuse. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only materials that have colorful diffuse but gray-scale specularity are plastics. High gloss paints also have desaturated specularity, but their specularity also has fresnel characteristics (reflectivity changes with view angle). Common paints have similar color in specular as they have in diffuse. Metals ALWAYS have same saturation and hue in specular as they do in diffuse (if they have ANY diffuse reflectivity at all).
But I digress... What I was trying to say is that you don't really need a "texture" for almost any material, unless the material is painted with a pattern, or is dirty, and you can get dirt and variations of surface polish by sprinkling a bit of noise in specular and shininess, respectively; you don't need a sophisticated procedural for that. Now, if you were trying to represent wood, or cobble stones, or something like that, then yes.
