Behind the scenes: Texturing

Today I’m going to showcase bit of my texturing workflow. In the past I’ve been using lots of textures from various sources and edited them on my own.

This year I decided to step up and try to make textures by all my own using Substance Sampler.

Workflow

It all starts with taking photos from outdoors; rocks, ground, forest floor etc. what ever you would want to create a texture from.

Nowadays you can simply use your smart phone to take photos with, quality of the photographs is good enough at least for my use.

I’ve found that flat and “clean” surfaces with not too many tiny details work the best, but you can capture more detailed ones too like you can see from the photograph above. If there’s too much going on, it can get too messy when working with height displacement.

I usually clean up my raw photograph a bit in Photoshop/Affinity Photo, and after that I open it up in Substance Sampler.

Importing photograph into Sampler.

In Sampler, I simply drag & drop the photograph in, and use the “Image to Material (AI Powered)” tool to generate 3D texture from it. It’s almost good enough as it is but once again, I clean it up a bit with “Make It Tile” tool to make it look more seamless and after that I’m ready to go!

Before/After using “Make It Tile” tool in Substance Sampler.

I export the texture from Sampler and apply it into my models in Stager and usually tweak the displacement strenght to get it look nice as possible. I’ve been really suprised how easy this has been and how good looking textures you can create out of the photos you took with your phone!

Using the texture in Substance Stager.

Thanks for reading, check out my Behance for artwork where I’ve been using this technique.

Clouds and smoke with Adobe Dimension

2023 Update: this works on Adobe Substance Stager as well!

Creating Opacity map

To begin with, you need photos of smoke, cloud or fog. (Or whatever you might want to use.)

In this tutorial I used two (quite low resolution) samples which are taken from:
https://www.brusheezy.com/brushes/2187-24-clouds (by Mila Vasileva)

Once you have your photos, you have to make them white with a black background in order to get the best results.

Using Opacity map in Dimension

Once you have made your photo, open Dimension and add Plane. Other objects might work as well, for example Spheres if you want to have some curvature in your smoke.

Next step is to add your photo in to the Opacity map of the plane. (You can drag & drop it in there)

Properties

I played around with the settings a bit. With this scene I set Roughness to 20%, Glow 25% and Translucence up to 1.

With roughness and translucence you can control how much of transparency you get. With Glow you can easily add some brightness.

You can get even better results when playing around more with the properties and environment lightning

Video Recap

Results

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