Quote - > Quote - I actually think that it is probably harder to create the displacement after the diffuse maps maybe someone like Rawn(who is a master of displacement could give us insight into whether he creates them first or further down the track...

Still sounds like it was a great seminar...pity I missed it.

cheers

 Pen

 

Hah...I dont know about master...but lord knows I made my fair share of them.

I actually do about 90% of all my texture work in photoshop, then I bring it into other programs like bodypaint to touch up things like seams.

I find photoshop leaves me with cleaner, crisper maps than what comes out of programs that paint directly on the object. But thats just me, I have seen others get great results from different programs. I am just very old-school.

Displacment maps, diffuse maps and all my other maps are all individually made. When I make my maps I usually have many different effect layers in photoshop (20 to 30 at times), and I may use one effect on the to displace things on the displacment layer, which I may also bring over to the texture layer at a much lower percentage just to give an extra hint of colour/depth to the texture. I may also bring that in to the spec layer to adjust it slightly too.

Since all the layers have to play together I make them all at the same time, so I can see how they interact and that lets me decide on which map I should bump things up or tone them down till I get the final effect I am looking for.

Achieving realism in a render is vastly different than achieving realism in the real world. No matter how we set up our scene with lighting, and no matter what effect nodes we apply, in the end we will only end up with a poor simulation of reality. The node set-up tries to emulate life, but it will always fall short. That is where a texture artist has to know what they are doing and build the texture maps accordingly to help overcome the shortcomings of this digital set-up.

So even the most photo-real texture sources will never simply give the same photoreal look renders. As texture artists we have to play with the medium and massage it in many different ways to try to give the appearance of something believably real.

 

Rawn

thanks for the answer Rawn...lots to think about. I've got zbrush but haven't really used it much yet. I tend to use photoshop for textures because I feel very comfortable using it.