Recently I’ve been doing quite a lot of photogrammetry for trees trunks. I am using almost the same workflow as Bertrands guide, but in my case, I have to make tileable texture. So far so good, but there is one problem. I want to get good displacement and normal maps from ZBrush, and I get them. But when it comes to editing texture to make it tileable - I cannot find a way to edit maps altogether. I start with editing the diffuse map to make it tileable, and I want to project those edits to normal and displace textures.
The only way, for now, I’ve found is using actions (macros in affinity), but they are not catching everything, and I ended up creating displace and bump textures from diffuse texture, which is not the way I want to do this.
Do you guys have any idea on how to do that properly?
At the moment i’m using nuke but that’s far from practical.
I read that in the latest release of substance designer there are tools to address this. I haven’t tried it personally, but it looks exactly what we would need. My only concern would be the ability to retain 32bit displacement.
Thanks for the info. The only problem is that i am creating tileable textures - and i need quite a lot of editing. It is not only clone\stamp and etc, it is also using highlight/darkener brushes, smart selection tools to copy regions, using pupper wrap and etc. Maybe i tend to do things more complicated way than i should, though the only problem in this workflow is translating these edits among all the maps.
I’m not sure about the other tools you’re using, but at least Affinity allows you to clone/stamp across several layers at the same time, which Photoshop doesn’t. That’s how I tile my photogrammetry textures.
Thanks for your reply, Bertrand. Actually, because of your article I started to use Affinity, and I really like it (there were a couple of crashes though, but this is relatively new software, and updates are quite often). Can you please guide me on how to clone on several layers?
I was just noodling around with the beta and found that just selecting all layers before starting to offset and clone on the topmost layer transfers all the edits to the layers below. I think you don’t even need to group the layers (can’t remember for sure but not sitting at my workstation right now).
It doesn’t work with the warping tool though but from memory, there’s a tool to repeat the latest warp action, which you can use on each layer separately to transfer the change down the stack.
For trees, this is great. You can use a scanned asset with a custom texture for the bottom of the trunk and merge it into a more generic tileable trunk texture (derived from the scanned asset) for the higher portion of the trunk (using a gradient mask) and the branches. I seem to remember this is what the DICE guys did for the giant sequoia trees in Battlefront: Scanned asset for up to 10 meters merging into a tileable map for everything higher than that.
Great!
Tanks for the hint, will try that.