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I will. This thread is my first real attempt to learn texturing although I am working my way through Dreamlights texturing tutorial as well. I am really interested in exploring the fact that it will do the bump normal and other maps all at the same time since I don't know enough to really create those myself. Really excited about the possibilities since texturing is something I have wanted to be able to do since I first started Daz in September and realized it was possible. Super excited about the possibilities. Now if I just didn't have a day job...
OK, the good news is I got my product in and accepted for testing, so thank goodness that is done. I still have to pretty up a few thumbnails, but that is done. Let me catch up with the comments, and then we can do the Fantasy Castle.
Apologies if I miss anyone. Hit me on the head if you need to .
Hi Vaskania - I really like your cheerful flower with the frosted glass background. Good to see you here.
Free tip for all -it is super easy to make patterned glass in Iray by using one of the Daz provided glass shaders, and putting the black and white map in the bump channel. Try it out.
TJ-nice work on the green dress. Very mod. I have to tell you, I am super impressed with the entire render of the living room. The light is perfect for a daytime room with no lamps turned on, and the whole thing looks like a magazine photo for interior decorating. The rug is just - wow! I'd do with one of those in my house too.
Ice Dragon - you have been busy. Very pretty stuff. Oh, and brussels sprouts are amazing, if you roast them. Have you ever tried this? http://www.kitchentreaty.com/how-to-roast-brussels-sprouts/
Textures and recipes, how good is life?
Kit - you got a great effect on the purple and blue dress. The metallic look is really highlighting the weave. It was a great idea to composite a bump map with the black and white pattern to get more control over the effect. Wow, wow, wow, on the sparkly purple dress. She does look ready to go clubbing, and I don't think she will have to buy a single drink for herself.
xmasrose-Welcome. The purple dress looks great. You picture is a perfect example of how surfaces can look drastically different in different light. Thanks for sharing your examples.
Kismet - good color combo on the cage drape. Well done.
Welcome KevinH. Still plenty of room in the second row for you.
I suppose I can give that recipe a try. My memories of brussel sprouts growing up are less than stellar. I am trying to increase my veggie intake though so I am trying to introduce new ones every couple of weeks. Will give this a try next time I go the grocery store and pick some up.
Glad you got things finished up, that must be a relief. I always feel good when a project is finished. Cant wait to see the result.
I know how you feel about the day job
, I work 6 days /week, 12 hours/day so along with the daily drudgeries of owning a house and looking after it I only have about 2 hours in the evening and my one day off to play, the only plus is I can bring my laptop to work and do some things but my 3D computer stays at home.
Destiny so happy you got your new product submitted and looking forward to learning some more :)
So Sonja and Kharma both picked up Filter Forge? That is so fabulous. It is weird that it was showing different discounts depending on your browser.
I want to do a discussion (me rambling) about resources. Unless your are very good at digital painting, there really is no good way to get store quality texture resources, for free. So where do they come from? I touched briefly on this in one of my opening posts, so now I'll expand on it. Bear with me, it may take a few posts.
Option 1 - Take your own photographs. Expense - camera, lens, and time of learning your camera and processing the pictures. I'm using a Cannon Rebel T3I with a 18-250mm lens with macro. Not top of the line by any means, but I think the whole set up was around $700. I'm not the expert on digital cameras, mega pixels and all that. You just need something that will give high enough resolution to look good in the renders.
Example time.
Here is a picture I took at the Duluth Superior zoo, and the conditions were actually a bit more sunny than what would be ideal. The original size of the image is 5184x3456, but it has been greatly shrunk down for this example. Note how at the top of the picture, the brick line is pretty straight, and at the bottom it is curved. There is also curving (barrel distortion) on the sides of the picture. This picture was taken with an inexpensive lens, and not the 18-250mm which I have upgraded to, but some degree of barrel distortion, or the opposite, fish eye, can happen even with very expensive lenses.
Here is a sample of the brick at 100% of the original picture.
It actually is more grainy than I would like, and see how there are shadows under the brick? That will have to be fixed too. The moral of the story is, if you take your own pictures, anything you can do to minimize the time you have to spend in your image editor is a good thing. Watch how your image is filling the frame, watch for shadows, and remove distracting things like debris or weeds if you can.
Here is what the untouched photo looks like in a render with a person for scale. I am using the backdrop that comes with my Photo Studio products. It is just a back wall and a floor, and all I did here was put the photo in the base color channel.
Interesting, but holy hugness batman. That won't do at all. So you may be asking why didn't I back up and get more of the walll in the frame? Well, I have done it that before, and sometimes it works OK, and sometimes it doesn't. The advantage of getting in closer is you can get more detail in the bricks. The disadvantage is that you might have to stitch together multiple pictures, or get creative covering up any obvious tiling. Also, a lot of the detail is going to be gone when we shrink this down to a usuable size. I was not able to back up in this particular case, because that would have put me in the tiger pen, and he was sounding hungry.
I changed the tiling down to 3, and I see that is a more reasonable scale. Obviously, this picture is going to take some work.
Next, we need to get a seamless tile out of a picture of crooked bricks. Now I could talk about seamless tiles for days. I love them. Who doesn't? There are probably at least a hundred ways to do it. I know there are very many tutorials and filters for Photoshop, and if anyone has ones they like and can recommend, certainly put links here, and I'll stick them in the start of the thread. Paintshop Pro has a built in filter for seamless tiling, Photoshop probably does too. It doesn't matter how you get there. Use what works. I used Genetica, using the synthesis node, and after about an hour messing around with settings, came up with this.
Many apologies, I know I completely glossed over a large step, but really, the topic of seamless tiles from photographs is too large to cover in this particular post. We can discuss further, and more in depth if needed. You may have to do your own research to find what works for you using the tools you have and the required end result.
My seamless tile was generated at 3000x3000 and I know the space I need to fill is 2400x2000, which is the size of my backdrop wall. Using my new seamless tile as a pattern, I used the fill tool to fill in my template. I had the pattern scale set to 30% because it roughly equals the tile value of 3 I liked in the example above.
Here is a screen shot from PSP
And the new render.
Much better! But there is still a bit of work to be done.
Looking at the last render, there is a very large problem. I know where the repeat is, and I can't *not* see it. Now if this was a tile for a shader set, there wouldn't be too much we could do about it, because we have no idea of the end use. Since this is a backdrop, for a particular item, I can't leave those repeats hanging there.
Now for the fun part in in our image editor. If my seamless tile had been a bit better, I wouldn't have so much clean up to do. Zooming in on the background texture I just made, I see there are trouble spots along the line of the tile. There is a red brick with a very distinctive white mark on it, a bad grout line, and a few bricks that change color, mid brick.
My next step is to take some generic bricks from my picture, and use them to either clone out or cover over the super distinctive brick. The best process for each person is going to largely depend on the how familiar you are with your image editor, and the tools you like to use. My preferred method is typically to select a brick with the rectangle selection, small feather of about 2-4, promote the selection to layer, and move the promoted brick over one of trouble areas.
Here is before and after. I only did three bricks, but immediately you can see your eye is not drawn to the obvious line made by the abrubt color changes in the bricks.
The amount of time you want to spend on that is up to you. Again, a better starting photograph would take less fixing to make it usuable. I'm going with a worse case scenario here.
Fast forward a few hours, I'm looking for my unmerged file. Hang on.
*DG Sighs*
I interrupt this tutorial to bring you a few words of free advice. Tip 1 - save your work often. Tip 2 - always save an unmerged copy of your files in case you need to modify a layer, or do a tutorial some years in the future. Tip 3 - create a file system and be meticulous about sorting your working files into it. Tip 4 - make backups of your files. Tip 5 - don't search your hard drive for the word "brick" unless you have some time to kill while your computer locks up looking through 1TB of "stuff."
OK, fast forward a few hours and pretend that I have a nice brick wall with no obvious repeats. Next step is grunge. Here is where you want to get out all of those cool Ron's brushes, or search your Filter Forge library or their website for "Grunge" This one is great. https://www.filterforge.com/filters/9834.html
You can spend as much time on this step as you want. A few bonuses about adding a grunge layer or 6, is that you can further cover over tiling repeats, it adds a personal touch, and takes away the "too clean" or sterile feeling. Here is a screen shot of my layers.
And the render, pretending I actually took the time to fix the bricks in the picture.
For comparison, here is a render of the texture I made for the Photo Studio Point and Shoot 3 set, using the same original photograph, and the same techniques.
I hope you can see the difference in the one that took half hour, and the one that took 5 hours, lol.
Whew. Everyone still with me? Dang it, we didn't even get to the bump map yet. Stay tuned.
Bookmarking this and will go through it when I have a free moment. Thanks a lot! My 2D skills really need to catch up with my 3D skills I think.
I actually got my copy of FF a while back when it was on a big discount throught the Daz store. I played with it a bit then, but when you started this thread it inspired me to dust it off and start actually learning what it can do :)
Also Picked up FF for 79$ (Never knew using the right browser would save me money ;-) Will download and try later (or on the weekend)
So how to do I get the bump normal etc options to show up in filter forge? I have a pattern up but wanted to generate the bump displacement and normal maps for it. The options are all grayed out.
My husband has a really nice camera which takes amazing pictures so that is an option for me to use if I can learn the rest of it lol
Never mind I found it
Sonja, I found some good tutorials @ geekatplay.com and I think it said that under the render menu you just render the pattern out for whatever type and size you need, don't quote me on that tho cause I am going from memory and somedays that just isn't so good lol
Filter Forge screen shot for posterity. If the options are greyed out, those filters don't support the extra maps.
Thanks a lot on the walkthrough to do a tileable brickwall, just a heads up for the GIMP users out there, there is an option to make something tileable in Gimp as well. I have used it on some occasions but with patterns that don't matter in direction. there is probably more to it I yet have not found.
On a second note here is the link to the pixar library with a nice FREE collection of texture tiles coming with bump and normal map https://community.renderman.pixar.com/article/114/library-pixar-one-twenty-eight.html
Concerning the pattern on a cloth in metallic flace... as that was in Iray, I wandered about to see what I can do in 3delight and then got sidetracked and stuck in the depth of shader mixer. In that endeavor I found this thread with a list of shader mixer tutorials, might be helpful to others with similar intentions http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/25448/list-of-shader-mixer-tutorials-and-recipes-wip-please-be-patient-as-i-update-the-list-thanks/p1
Destiny looking at your screen shot, I see PSP X8 behind FF, does FF work as a plugin in PSP the same as Ps? I see mine as a plugin in Ps but I haven't tried using it that way, just stand alone, but I also have PSP X6 and was curious if it's a plugin for it also.
That was very interesting how you created that brick texture, I have to say the second one looks much more blended between the grunge and the bricks
The resources discussion turned into a full blown tutorial on how to texture something with a photograph. I don't know how many of you noticed, but I can be a little flighty.
Option 2 - stock photography sites. Advantages - some are free, some are inexpensive for just the images you need. Disadvantages - you still need to go through all the steps you would if using your own photos, and don't have any control over the picture. My own experience has shown that the good stock photography sites, if they allow a certain amount of free images per day or whatever, they are very small. The larger or high res ones always cost.
Consider this brick texture from a site I like called textures.com http://www.textures.com/download/bricksmallbrown0261/65720 You can get 15 free credits a day, which would let me get an image 1600x1293. That is not super helpful if I need to fill a space that is 2400x2000. The larger image sizes cost premium credits, which at that site cost $12 for 100 credits. Not bad really, and the 3000x2425 image would probably work perfectly for my needs.
*Check the terms of use for any stock photography site you download from.* At textures.com, you can use the images for textures baked to a texture map, but not to make materials. I would be OK, using them for my backdrop wall, but not for a shader set.
Option 3 - merchant resources. Some of these are really great, and the best part is, they are designed by people who know what the end use is going to be. A word of caution, be sure what you are getting, and what the terms of use are for the merchant resource. Some of them do not allow usage for freebies, for example. Another thing to be sure of is exactly what is included in the pack. If you get a person living in Europe who has access to brilliant ancient stone walls of the type we just don't have in Minnesota, and they are giving you original photos at 3000x5000 pixels, plus they also made some seamless tiles for you, and put in bump, normal and specular maps at 2000x2000, that sounds like a good deal. If the resource is a set of lace at 512x512 that was generated from Filter Forge, you might want to skip it, depending on the price and the amount of time you think it might save you.
Thanks. I'm glad you found it useful.
Yes, when I installed Filter Forge, it gave me a list of installed programs that can use FF as a plug in, so I chose PSP and PS Elements from the list.
Thanks for the contributions Linwelly, and the note about GIMP. Looks like there is some good stuff in the Pixar collection. I've done that before on getting completely side tracked in shader mixer. The shader mixer thread is really informative.
Welcome Toyen.
I have to bounce around again for a quick minute, and back up to bump maps from photographs. Knowing the hard way makes us appreciate the easy way all the more.The very first brick wall texture I made from a photo, took about a week, on and off, because I was working out the process, and desperate to find any shortcuts to get out of doing what I knew I had to do.
Going back the brick seamless tile in the last part, we have about four colors of brick, and a light grey grout. The grout needs to be indented on the bump map, which means it needs to be darker than the brick. The bricks of different colors, some darker, some lighter, need to be of the same value. This will be fun. Now, one of the easiest ways to get a bump map from a diffuse texture, is simply to desaturate it and bump up the contrast. For some things, this actually works really well and looks good in the render. It won't help us here. Believe me I have tried every combination of desaturation, brightness/contrast, negative image, and specialized filters that you can think of. Some with better success than others as much depends on the contrast of the base color map.
This is what it looks like with desaturation, invert or negative image, and brightness/contrast. The goal is to get a clean line on the grout.
The second image is almost "OK" except for the fact the crevices in the brick which should be darker on the bump map, are now lighter, which will read as raised points in the render, which is not at all what we want. And we are never going to get a clean normal map from any of those images.
Ready to give up yet, and quit wasting time trying to find an easy out? *DG sighs* I am. We are going to have to select around each of the bricks. Manually. By hand.
This took me about 15 minutes using the rectangle selection, but I have done it before, and this was not very carefully done. Had this been for an actual product, I would have used the lasso selection, set to point-to-point and been much more careful about it. You see the marching ants around all the bricks. Sometimes it easier to select the grout in long strips, sometimes it is helpful to use a touch screen computer, or tablet if you have one. Listening to your favorite music or audio book is also very wise, and helps prevent the "OMG, I'm going to have pull out all of my hair in boredom, why did I think this was a good idea?" syndrome.
Focusing in on the details, you will definately want to remove the rounded corners or chipped sections from the grout selection. The more time you put into this step, the better the final result. Save your selection as alpha channel or equivalent in case you need to go back to modify it later.
Make a new layer, invert the selection so the not brick parts are selected, and flood fill your selection with black or dark grey. Put a new layer under that and fill the whole layer with dark grey or light grey. I've noticed that Iray prefers darker bump maps with dark grey and black, while 3Delight prefers light grey with dark grey. Either will work for either render engine, as long as the indented part is darker than the raised up part. I did a black on white map too, to help make the normal map.
Does anyone feel like the Karate Kid yet wondering what "Wax on" "Wax Off" and "Paint the Fence" have anything to do with Karate? All the pieces will add up. I promise.
Back to the bump. Since I am using Iray for most of this, lets' grab the mid grey with black grout image. It's pretty good, but the strong point of bump maps is to add subtle details to the final texture. I'm going to take my desaturated image and layer it with the grey/black image. I added some gaussian noise to the black grout layer, and set the layer to 80%. Close up of the result. You can see the dark areas on the bricks for the indents, and the subtle graininess on the grout to simulate all the sand particles.
Normal maps are easy peasy. Take the blacks and white map and open Filter Forge. There are about 20 FF filters that do nothing but normal maps, along with so many filters that have normals as one of the alternate render maps. I like this one because of the controls you get. tps://www.filterforge.com/filters/8536.html Of course, there are very many filter options out there to create normal maps. Do a web search to find the one that fits you.
So check it, how clean is this?
The easy way to think of it, good normal maps can replicate modeled details, and bump maps add depth to the surface details. As always, that is just a general guidline, and each situation is different. I'm really happy with these maps, so what do they look like rendered? I made these bump and normals off the original seamless tile, so that means I need to flood fill them on the backdrop template at 30 percent, just like I did with the color map. I like to set the map in my color channel to "none", and chose a mid grey color when setting up the surfaces to check the effect of the other maps, without being influenced by any shadows or other details on the color map. This looks pretty convincing, even in grey.
Put the color map back in, render, and BAM! I haven't even messed with any of the other surface settings yet, and it is looking pretty good.
That is pretty much all there is to it.
Two quick points about this:
Here's two and a half quick tips :)
I have never turned it (gamma correction) off, and never noticed any issue with Daz Studio, but I don't regularly render in Carrara or Blender Cycles, so I'll believe you that there could be issues. The FF version 5 ability to lock any parameters from randomizing is a HUGE time saver. Good FF tips there. Thanks for adding them.
Dang it!
I actually remember saying I probably wasn't going to buy Filter Forge just yet. When I said it, it was true. I had no intention of buying yet ANOTHER product to learn!!
But I panicked! I logged on to their site today, which was supposed to be the day after the sale was over, and it was over. The price was back up to $399 or whatever. No more sale. (Phew! Saved!)
Then I remember someone saying that their Chrome browser showed a different price. So I logged on to the FF site using Chrome, and wouldn't you just know it!? STILL ON SALE AND FOR 80% OFF! HURRY! BUY NOW!!
And I panicked.
And bought it.
Dang...
David, you will be happy you did, and I'll show you why very soon.
Ok...well, now I feel a little better.
All right,...I give up. Where do I find the !Iray Uber shader? I've applied it before to a figure. I think it was under Iray/Other in the Shader folder? But with a plane in my scene, I'm not finding this shader. Under Iray, there isn't an other folder under iray with or without the plane selected.
Thanks.
Content Library or Smart Content?
It is either under Shaders, or Shader Presets. Make sure you have the Daz Studio default lights and shaders installed too. It is a seprate download from the Daz Studio download.