Texture Photography: tips and tutorials?
polycounter lvl 11
I just bought a Nikon D3100 DSLR and i'm planning to go out on some texture photography. Do you guys have any tips and/or links to tutorials regarding the best workflow for this?
I'm planning to shoot some photos and use Substance Designer to create tiling textures, as well their maps. Is there any other tool that you guys would suggest? NDO maybe?
I'm planning to shoot some photos and use Substance Designer to create tiling textures, as well their maps. Is there any other tool that you guys would suggest? NDO maybe?
Replies
1. Use a tripod!
2. take WAY more photos than you think you'll need. Shoot from different distances, angles, time of day, etc. What looks good on your rear viewfinder won't necessarily look good when blown up on a monitor.
3. Lighting is extremely important. If you are shooting outdoors, wait for an overcast day, it will give you the most even lighting. Bounce cards can really help here.
http://www.cgtextures.com/
http://www.hourences.com/tutorials-texture-photography/
If you do a "photo texture making tutorial" google search there is a ton more. I also found that if you get back and shoot zoomed in you can reduce barrel distortion.
Yeah this is all good advice. Here is some more
1. Make sure to shoot at base ISO, usually this is ISO 100 or 200 on DSLRs. This will mean the best image quality (most dynamic range, least noise, and best color depth).
2. If there isn't enough light to get a fast shutter speed at low ISO, a tripod can be handy. If you've got shutter speeds over 1/500th a tripod is not really necessary (unless you're shooting with a 500mm+ lens which is unlikely). When picking out a tripod, I would go for something small and lightweight, otherwise you will probably never take it will you. I just picked up one of [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Mefoto-A0350Q0K-Backpacker-Travel-Tripod/dp/B00BETIVUM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391614764&sr=8-1&keywords=mefoto+backpacker"]these[/ame] for 360 HDR pano photography, the same company makes a [ame="http://www.amazon.com/MeFoto-A1350Q1B-Roadtrip-Travel-Tripod/dp/B003ANK9ZA/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1391614841&sr=8-4&keywords=mefoto"]slightly larger model[/ame] too. I went with the smaller one as I am taking it with me to europe and I wanted the lightest and smallest, but still sturdy, tripod I could find, and I'm very happy with it so far.
3. Shoot in raw, process in lightroom. This will give you the best leverage to correct white balance, exposure, etc, the dynamic range of a raw file is in the range of 12-14 stops at low ISO, and a JPEG is significantly less.
4. Use a macro lens or a decent prime, even something like a $150 50mm 1.8 prime lens is going to be way better than the kit zoom that comes with your camera. Macro lenses are very sharp, and sharp across the frame.
5. You will generally want to stop the lens down to F5.6-8 for optimal sharpness and to make sure your depth of field is wide enough. This means shooting with slower shutter speeds, so again a tripod can be handy (or a camera with IBIS but that's another topic).
6. As said above, lighting is very important, overcast cloudy days are your friend.
7. Watch your perspective, generally you want to capture reference textures from as straight on as possible to avoid perspective distortions and converging lines.
8. When shooting with a tripod, shoot with the 2 second timer, a wired shutter cord or a wireless shutter remote so you don't bump the camera/tripod when taking the photo.
9. Pre-focus your shot after you've lined it up on the tripod, and fire off a couple exposures to make sure you get a good one without any blur.
10. Live view is generally best when working on a tripod.
For generating normals etc from photos, nDo, knald, crazybump, etc are common options.
For more advanced stuff, you can do cross-polarized photography to extract the diffuse and specular channels:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/TakingBetterPhotosForTextures.html
http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/Diffusion/
etc
If you can't get a straight on shot, try to get futher from it and use a long (telephoto) lens, this will compress the persective and result in less need to do perspective correction later (which will distort/blur the texture).
There is no easy solution to taking reference photos with bright/directional light, you can painstakingly remove/repaint the light, or use some more advanced rig like a cross polarizing setup, even then I think you would want to try to shoot with ambient light as much as possible.
At some point the cost of equipment, time spent taking the photos and then processing them probably outweighs the benefit. Quixel is coming out with a pretty cool tool soon, I'm not sure what I can say about it but the need to go out and create your own reference photos will be lessened when it is released.