Without Good Textures, no Mercy!
Deco Lobby (image courtesy of DAZ) http://www.daz3d.com/deco-lobby
Textures?
For more than a year now, there been a huge change in the way we design things for 3D…
In the past, things were simple. When you wanted to do a texture for your character or your prop, you only had to create a diffuse, a Bump, a specular and maybe a displacement map…
Life was easy…
A good Photoshop and a bit of knowledge and you were pretty much the king of the world!
But we are only human and we always want more and more for our renders!!!
A few years ago, we started to see on the market many external render engines that were able to make better and better renders.
Reality was one of the first to get a link with Poser and DAZ. Then we started to see Octane…
Outstanding effects and outstanding quality!
Then, DAZ made a great change to get outstanding rendering results and introduced Iray.
And…we had to learn everything again!!
It gives rapidly fabulous realistic results without having to be a shader expert!
Iray uses PBR textures in order to work properly and to give the best possible results.
What is “PBR”?
PBR stands for “Physically Based Rendering”.
It means that the renderer will interpret the way the light is interacting with the material like in the real life! It means also that the renderer will need different kind of maps to calculate an accurate result.
So, this is the end of texturing in Photoshop?
No, your photo editing application is still your best friend! But times are changing…
If you own the latest version of Photoshop, there is no need to get the previous NVidia plugin to generate your normal/ Height maps…the plugin is already in Photoshop!
Adobe has anticipated the changes and has given us the basic tools to work in this new 3D world!
So, where is the change?
If you have a closer look at the top of your DAZ Shader, you will see in Iray mode that there are 2 options:
PBR metallicity/Roughness and PBR Specular/Glossiness…
The first is made to react like a metal would and the second can be used in most other cases. So, now, you have to create multiple maps depending of the kind of real material you want to reproduce. If you really want to understand what it means and how it works, there are 2 very good tutorials to get a better understanding of the PBR world:
https://www.allegorithmic.com/pbr-guide
And, If I want to create my own PBR textures?
Well, there is some software to do that. There are actually 2 amazing softwares to do that:
Quixel or Substance Suite
I’m using Substance Suite. It’s just a personal choice. Both are amazing.
Substance Designer is really a great tool to create amazing textures and get them ready for PBR workflow. You can use the generated maps directly or create materials to do 3D painting in Substance Painter!
You get a ton of brick to create your material:
I will simply start with 2 blocks, one with a cobblestone texture already set and a second for weathering.
Just plug the right corresponding channels between blocks
Adding bricks and modify the corresponding settings will give you the expected result
And finally, they introduced Iray renderer! Now, no surprise when getting back in DAZ!!
It’s really a quick example, you can do far better things with just a little knowledge!
OK, But if I do not want to invest in a new software?
Just this week I saw some new products by iSourceTextures available at DAZ!
Those are the base textures for many scene situations!
http://www.daz3d.com/wood-collection-vol1
http://www.daz3d.com/grass-collection-vol1-pbr-textures
http://www.daz3d.com/metal-collection-vol1-pbr-textures
And if you want to learn how to create really great scene :
http://www.daz3d.com/texture-master
Happy texturing !
Fly028 is an accomplished 3D C.G. enthusiast. He has been creating content for DAZ Studio and Poser. Fly028 collaborates with DREAMLIGHT on trainings and content development which he has done for some years now.
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