Texture painting.
DVoid
Posts: 40
Can I start a petition for PAs to stop painting artificial folds onto diffuse textures?
In a world where we have ray-tracing, mesh subdivision, micro-displacement, d-Force, and HD morphs; there's absolutely no reason to paint fake folds onto a piece of clothing, anymore.
This isn't 2008. It looks awful and limits the lighting setups you can use to accommodate the fake folds, otherwise they just end up looking even worse.
I've even seen some clothing items that are d-Force, but still have painted folds on them, as well. One of the promo pictures even showed the d-Force with more natural folds, but then the fake painted ones on top of that which made it even more obvious how fake the painted folds were.
If you must add small folds, do it with an HD morph, then you have the added benefit of using the over-used and dead marketing jargon, and saying it's HD CLOTHING!
Or just use displacement maps (actual "hd moprhs" would be ideal and preferred, but displacement maps can be acceptable).
Please, let us stop this madness.
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Comments
This! So much this! The shortcuts and dumb choices made by (unfortunately) quite a few of the PAs are sort of a PITA to use trying to use said assets. How about just doing it how it should be done, instead of taking shortcuts?
Thank you for expressing this sentiment in reasonable jargon. I refer to the section that I redacted. In the forums, I once simply stated "death to baked in wrinkles."
While I agree with you I would like to point out that Iray does not have micro displacement like 3Delight did.
Fixed that for you.
Well, in any event, there are other ways to get wrinkles and folds. There are no reason to paint them onto textures, anymore. With ray-tracing and PBR, it's very obvious and evident the object is flat and the texture is painted to try and create an illusion of having wrinkles. Even most modern games don't use that method anymore. Raising the subd one or two extra steps to get displacement textures to work properly won't break your system.
I'd propose to amend the petition* (since there's still plenty of reason to paint (or bake) in folds and shadows) to this very easy option - Please include a "flat" material option, without them.
* that reads like it sounds pretty serious - like "This r sereus petion!" or something - it's intended to be conversational. I'm just bad at 'conversational'. :)
I'd laugh, if I didn't have a system that really can't afford to use large amounts of its limited VRAM to subdivide everything, and frequently drops to CPU when I do.
Although less realistic close-up, for some users there is still a considerable benefit of non-geometry based manipulation of surface normals, such as bump and normal maps.
That's fair, but I really can't imagine any scenario where you'd need painted shadows and folds on a material.
My argument isn't bump and normal maps. Those can still be used for whatever they're needed. My issue is with textures being baked to look like they have folds on them, when they don't. It looks like a flat surface with weird shadowing painted onto them.
There is the "ideal" way to do things, and then there is what sells.
I am not a clothing maker, but as a PA I can assure that there are many things that customers ask and have logical reasons for it, that just don't sell well in the market.
We have to cater to all skills levels, all tech levels (or at least as many as we can), so while what you are saying may be technically true, it does not always mean it will be practical in the marketplace.
Also, while this tech gets closer and closer to simulating the real world, we (as PA's) still have to make what looks good in renders, and that is where the art has to balance off the technical reality of the product. There will always have to be creative tricks put onto textures to make then render nicely. If people went for strict world realism, then you would find renders to end up looking very flat and boring.