ANSWERED: how to handle tiling repetition in masks?
polycounter lvl 6
Hi guys,
I was wondering what kind of best practices could be recommended in cases where using smart material masks creates extreme repetition on surface details (scratch mask for example).
my texel density is at 512px/m (one 2k sheet equals 4 meters). so I constantly get very poor results on flat surfaces. I can reduce that by excluding the surfaces themselves, restricting the masks purely too the edges but that leaves the surfaces almost too clean. any ideas or is this a case that just isn't suitable for the existing smart materials? I was thinking about creating custom scratch masks but haven't looked into that yet.
increasing the texel density ratio isn't helping either as it makes scratches unnaturally large.
I was wondering what kind of best practices could be recommended in cases where using smart material masks creates extreme repetition on surface details (scratch mask for example).
my texel density is at 512px/m (one 2k sheet equals 4 meters). so I constantly get very poor results on flat surfaces. I can reduce that by excluding the surfaces themselves, restricting the masks purely too the edges but that leaves the surfaces almost too clean. any ideas or is this a case that just isn't suitable for the existing smart materials? I was thinking about creating custom scratch masks but haven't looked into that yet.
increasing the texel density ratio isn't helping either as it makes scratches unnaturally large.
Replies
Its not a bad idea to create your own black and white materials to use just for blending though, I do that alot and its very usefull and the re-usage of that is very high!
To create a texture to use just for masking you simply make a black and white image ( make normals with ndo if you want too) preferably at least 4K. Then click "create new material" in ddo, input the b&w image as albedo and normal map in normal map slot if needed, then create, now you can use them in dynamask! The ones I made are in the pattern-catalogue in the material browser, not sure why but I call them patterns
That was a very long repyl, hopefully it makes sense!
the ideal scenario I think would be smart materials that contain subsets for different size scenarios that get automatically selected or scaled depending on the chosen texel size. or something that is optimized for a larger scale like 4 meters but scalable for 2 and 1m (the later seems to be what the smart materials are optimized for atm). it might even help if the textures used would be repeated using random 90 degree rotations and mirroring (unfortunately not supported by the pattern functionality of ps tho)
Got a visual example of that?
I simply made a shape in ndo really quick, and the goal here is to make some metal scraping showing through the paint. But first let me say that this should be the last resort, if you have the correct textel density and a dynamask that uses the cavities and edges of your mesh together with gradient and object space normal then the result should be fairly tile-less.
BUT in some cases you simply want wear and tear on flat surfaces and that is usually when the problems occur, so lets jump in to it. This project is 2048x2048 and the texel density is 1024.
The first image is just one material being used as a mask, doesnt look too sexy, obvious tiling.
Next one I´ve added another material in the dynamask. Already looking better but still,tiling can be see quite obviously and
it doesnt look that much like scratches either.
What I do next is that I group the single scratch-layer, now I can apply a dynamask to the group as well.
Notice that I scaled up the textures here, now teddy Reeeeeeeeally hates when I do this so hopefully he won´t see this post. But most times this can be OK, firstly because it doesn´t necessarily means the texture is scaled up beyond its own resolution, that´s down to texel density and and what resolution it was to begin with. Secondly, the second mask doesnt define the detail as much as the first mask did, this one is more of "general" mask.
So the result off all this looks like:
Breathtakingly beautiful to say the least, but the principal of it all is very useful. But as I said in the beginning, most of the time just using two materials mixed in one mask does the trick, but sometimes you just want some more control and this is the way I usually do it, Im sure there are several other was. And the better your inputs and texel density value is the less you are dependant on this method, but then again, sometimes you are faced with a big flat surface.
I would really like to encourage you to create your own patterns to use for masking, its super simple and very rewarding, and as I´ve said before the reusability is incredibly high!
The way the materials included in the suite where scanned make tiling a problem sometimes, I think they´re 50x50cm. But the scans in the Megascans library are bigger, can´t remember exactly (I should know this) but I think they´re 2mx2m patches, so obviously when Megascans launches that will also help a great deal!
Hope this helps, let me know if you have questions or if I missed something!
That would be really useful