Some pseudo-procedural texturing tests I did a while ago (click the image above). "Pseudo" because they're not really procedural... they are bitmaps in fact, which is great, because it's easy to make a cool looking tileable bitmap. "Procedural" because a shader can be simply applied to any object, quickly (there are some issues here though, of course... read on).
In each case a small bitmap is applied to a larger surface, and I'm layering 2 or more tiled textures with a noise alpha in between. The results are pretty random, yet clean. The coolest thing is you can get really close to them with the camera, like with real procedurals, because they're tiled so many times - a 512/512 pixels texture, which is not large in fact, covers only a small part of the object, and it repeats... and the even cooler thing is that it doesn't look repetitive. So... lightweight, clean, and I almost forgot - fast to set up! And just by changing the UV repeats you can fit it to any object. The thing is... I'm still looking for a way to not use layered textures but automatic UV mapping. Automatic UVs are cool because you get UV unwrap at the touch of a button and with perfect fit, no stretchiness. But unless you use a 3D paint tool and project paint on top of them, they're more or less useless. Another bad thing is... you get seams, and I'm looking for a way to blend with a falloff. Anyway, the cool things about them are more interesting... speed and ease of setup is the first one which I already mentioned, and it's huge, because if you have a ton of objects in your scene... it's great to be able to just assign shaders with one click, and a minimum amount of tweaking. Also, because the UV layout is chaotic, it breaks the repetition of a tiled texture. With certain textures, those seams are not that visible though - like with grids or soft textures, like small bump, skin, repetitive stuff... If I could get those UVs to blend... I could use more varied textures, like... all kinds of crazy things. Anyway, this approach is procedural in essence, not realistic, it doesn't replicate real-world texture-spread accurately, it's more... artistic, simplified (cartoony). But it looks cool, way cool!
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About me
I'm a character animator, visual artist, game dev, and music composer. I like to doodle, write, experiment, and plan my next big thing. I love tech that inspires and enables art. I have a formal background in music composition. And I like to walk around the world and see things up close. Archives
September 2021
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