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!
Comments
A test with some low poly geometry and paint effects. Not quite Vue 6 complexity... I could have added more grass I guess... but it rendered fast! At around 2 minutes per frame. Also, compared to Vue, it's a clean render, no grain, no flicker. So that's good. Also(!), it's part of Maya, so... that's even better. Vue integration with Maya seems to be not one of the best... and I found navigating Vue a very painful experience. I'd like an environment-creation plugin for Maya... because navigating and working in Maya is a breeze compared to many other 3D applications (or is it because I got used to it??) Did some color correction. Still ugly, but it was a fun experiment. Google Sketch Up! Yes, that is the name... And this is only the beginning. Muahahahahahahaha >:D Reality? Sayonara!!! Who's afraid of Blombo Monstro? Little children are definitely not! They know a bunch of NURBS spheres can't harm anybody... People kind of annoy me with their comments about originality. Not about my own work, I haven't created any fabulous works of art lately... but about stuff in general. Like now there this 'Bee Movie' comin' up, and I see people saying stuff like... "another cg movie about insects... that's original...". Hey, it's not a completely new thing, it's been done before, but that was a_n_o_t_h_e_rrrrr movieeeeee (yeah, more than one, I know)! Wolfy is fiiiiiiiiinally fiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiiished. I still have a few tweaks to make... I went through some posing tests and it seems like I have a few small problems in my pipeline and the fingers are not behaving 100% as expected, but I'll fix that stuff tomorrow; also, Maya 8 geometry cache is far from what I'd like, so I won't be able to go too crazy with shot-sculpting. But anyway, all in all, he's up'n'runnin'. Here are 2 pics. In the first one he's obviously leaning against something, but the object is missing... use your imagination :D Initially they were called "pork edges"... until I realized pork edges actually exist... aouch :D There seem to be a lot of "pork-things" out there, it's really hard to find "pork-somethings" that don't exist. Everything can be pork! |
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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