Miss B posted at 2:00AM Mon, 27 April 2020 - #4386810

Ladonna posted at 5:44PM Mon, 20 April 2020 - #4386752

Different Mat zones makes your texturing live more easy. Even when Texturing with SP is really like a walk in the park, different zones gives you more flexibility and let you more easy manage different body or prop parts.

I agree whole-heartedly. I can't think of anything else that could make texturing something easier than using Mat Zones.

I am using Substance Painter and Filter Forge since around 2014. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. Both are capable of creating PBR texture sets, especially since Filter Forge 9. Filter Forge: You can use a large library of material presets, you can also modify and adapt these inside Filter Forge, if you learn to handle the filter editor room (a bit similar to the advanced Poser material room). The reason why I use Filter Forge beside Substance Painter is, that it is very good in creating TILING materials. Tiling materials are good when you need to texture a large surface (like the outside of a house, or a parking or asphalt road). If you UV-map these traditionally and apply a texture map, it will look blurry from close distance, even if you crank the texture size up beyond 4000x4000. But a tiling texture which is done in a good way (no obviously repeating texture parts) can cover the entire region, but you can also approach to a close distance and see crisp detail even if the map is only 1000 or 2000 size.

Substance Painter: This software, on the other hand, is extremely good in analyzing your object geometry and automatically create and bake specific utility maps like curvature map, ambient occlusion map, thickness map, position map and more. In Filter Forge, the texture is being created with no knowledge about the target object and geometry. Opposed to this, Substance Painter loads and analyzes your model and knows it in every aspect. Now when you create any material which should depend on sharp corners (i.e. chipped off paint), SP knows automatically where to chip off the paint and unveil any underlying different material (like bare iron or wood). Also if you apply i.e. a filter to create scratches, which you can define in length and width and density and so on, you can also use the utility maps of the object to automatically place scratches only on exposed parts, and not in protected areas (like concave geometry or corners). This is something Filterforge is not capable of, since it has no knowledge about where you may later use the texture and which the geometry will be.

Another word about "Material-Zones": These have been implemented in order to allow for different material properties (like multiple colors and different glossiness on one object). So for a long time it was a state of the art and good quality indicator to create as many MAT-zones on an object as a user might ever wish to modify. Me myself I did the same in my content for many years, always proud to offer a maximum of versatility for my customers.

However, when I got into PBR texturing years ago around 2014 or 2015, I realized, that PBR textures offered much more power for different material properties on an object than MAT-zones could ever do. Here is why: In the traditional way, you can have as many different materials on an object, as there are MAT-zones existing on it. I.e. one for black plastic, another for orange plastic, one for corroded metal, another for a painted metal section, and so on. But when I learnt about PBR, I realized, that this is just a clever way to encode material properties in some few texture maps. One map determines the base color, another map the surface roughness, another map the metallicity (i.e. important for reflectivity and especially for the specular color which is always white for non-metals, always tinted for metal materials). With about 4 (or 5 for emissive materials or another map for transparency) you can create as many different materials on an object texture as there are pixel existing on the maps. So theoretically on a 4000x4000 texture map you can create as many as 16 million different materials if you wish! USING ONLY ONE SINGLE MATERIAL ZONE in Poser!! This versatility is extremely powerful when it comes to small scratches, dust and dirt variation, chipped off paint layers, and so on. This is why PBR textures can look so extremely realistic, because they can mimick all the small little details from the real world, without needing hundreds of MAT-zones for the variations. I know that we can add variation also in the advanced Poser material room, believe me, I know this material room extremely well, studied it evers since Poser 4 and always went to push it to the limits. However: as compared to possibilities with PBR encoding, this is a lame duck.

So in my humble personal oppinion: use Filter Forge when you plan to plaster large areas with tiling materials, and you don't need the materials to differ depending on your object geometry. Use Substance Painter instead, if you wand complex detail which could even depend on curvature of your geomety, exposed vs. protected areas, position of your surface (i.e. lower parts of your model have more dust than upper parts) or surface direction (horizontal parts have more dust than vertical parts) and so on.. This being said, I have not considered your financial budget here, only functionallity. And about MAT zones: since I use PBR encoding for my materials, MAT zones have become almost completely obsolete. I need one MAT zone per texture template, so if my model has large areas which need 3 texture maps to cover the object, then I need 3 MAT-zones, regardless of how many actually different materials I put on the object (probably hundreds of them!). Here is a sample render from a little prop which I added as a bonus to one of my products. A public phone. The entire phone has only one single material zone in Poser, because I didn't need more than one UV texture template to cover it fully. So, if I can do this with only one MAT-zone, why should I create more? Another MAT-zone i.e. for the outside hull would use exactly the same texture template like the other parts do anyway, so I would double the workload on Poser for rendering, without any reason or benefit. Should I later wish to modify something, lets say the outside color, I can do this in Photoshop on the base color map. Or if I want less specularity in some areas, it is easy to lighten up the roughness map (grayscale) in those areas. Its easy, once you got used to it. In a way I personally call it "next generation texturing". And especially when you try to create hybrid materials which work in Firefly and in Superfly, then you should go for PBR materials anyway.

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Don't render faster than your artistic Guardian Angel can fly... ;-)

Poser 5 to Poser Pro 11, Lightwave 11.6.3, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Substance B2M, Filter Forge 9, Blacksmith3D 6 Pro, Easy Pose 2, UV-Layout Pro, UVMapper Pro, Paintshop Pro 2019, Python, Pz3editor, PHI Hierarchy Builder, Headshop 12, Lux-Render, Reality3D, numerous utility programs