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Creating a shader from a texture?

tl155180tl155180 Posts: 994
in The Commons

Hi Guys,

So, I keep looking at all these excellent textures that come with the products I buy and wondering if its possible to create a shader from a small section of texture for personal use only? Presumably this would be done in Photoshop (or in my case Gimp, as I don't have Ps) rather than DS? For instance, I'd really like to be able to mimic the skin textures on a product like Infernal Behemoth's back into a shader and then apply it to a tentacle I attached to his upper back so that it roughly looks like it belongs on him. I don't need the results to be seamless or perfect or anything - just rougly would do and then I could postwork the seams.

So is this doable with relatively little fuss, or does it require a lot of know-how with texturing?

Thanks.

Comments

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 107,953

    A shader (preset) uses textures, it isn't a texture itself. What I think you want to do is take a segment of the maps (presumably you'd need diffuse/bump/specular and whatever others the set has), make a tilable section of it, and aply that to other figures. While there are various tools that will help you to make a tilable texture from an input, keeping the different map types in sync may be tricky and I'm afraid that applying it to another figure would show all the seams.

    One trick you can try is apply the set you want, but hold down the ctrl (cmd for mac) key while you do so and then in the dialogue that opens choose Ignore for Maps. That will give the settings from the material, using the textures that were already on the figure.

  • Chanteur-de-VentChanteur-de-Vent Posts: 567

    I've done something similar a couple of times. What I do is:

    1. Cut out a square part of the texture in photoshop (or Gimp, or Paint) and save as a separate file
    2. Use some shader that would have a similar material preset (like if I want to make white marble, I use the black marble from Iray shaders)
    3. Replace the texture file of the original shader by the one I made in the first step (you can do it in the surface tab)

    Unfortunately it doesn't work with shaders that don't have a texture option. But most of them do. In the worst case you can open a normal object with similar material (in your case say just a standard human figure), copy all the settings from the surface tab onto the object you wanted your texture for, then change the texture file.

    Hope this helps.

  • tl155180tl155180 Posts: 994

    Ah, I guessed it wouldn't be simple somehow. Thanks for the suggestions guys, I'll give those a try.

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