Best workflow for creating materials based on photo captures?
polycounter lvl 11
I have a Nikon D3100 and i'm planning to go out and capture some textures from the city and create some materials based on them. Do you guys suggest any workflow for this? I was thinking about treating them in Photoshop and using Substance Bitmap2Material to create the final materials. OR. I was thinking about trying NDO.
What do you guys suggest?
What do you guys suggest?
Replies
This is my second time going out for textures. The first time was OK: i went out on a cloudy day, with plenty of diffuse light, and i ended up using CrazyBump to create my materials. Even though the textures were good, the normals and speculars ended up pretty bad. Everything looked like plastic. And i have used seamlesstexturegenerator.com for making them tile.
This is all for the ideal scenario. If you don't have the budget then just apply my other advice and make due with what you've got.
Camera
Canon or Nikon DSLR (my personal preference) or micro four thirds if weight and size is an issue.
I personally have a 550d which I can recommend to anyone looking to get into any type of photography.
Lens
Zoom: I have an 18-55 kit lens which is the perfect range for me on a 1.6 crop sensor.
Though You shouldn't go too wide angle (around 20mm for me) because you'll start to see perspective distortion.
Prime: The canon 50mm 1.8 "nifty fifty" can produce some amazingly sharp pictures. The downside is that it's less versatile than the zoom. Also worth considering a 35mm or 28mm prime.
Accessories:
White balance card (or x rite passport if you need extreme accuracy.)
Circular polariser: Can be useful for getting rid of polarised reflections. Watch out with these though as they can cause vignetting and will reduce the light that enters your sensor by 2 stops.
Camera settings:
1. Always shoot in raw.
2. Aperture, Shutter speed and ISO
Aperture priority is the way to go for most people. Advanced photographers will probably want to use full manual. Find the sharpest aperture for your lens, I.e. f8 and leave it on that setting. Then set ISO to 100 or equivalent lowest setting.
Now your camera will automatically calculate the shutter speed.
As a very general rule of thumb the shutter speed shouldn't be slower than the focal length you're shooting at for sharp handheld pictures. so 1/50 for 50mm or 1/200 for a 200mm lens.
If your lens has IS this will be different but it's best to leave a good margin for error imo.
If your shutter speed is too slow then the first thing to do is up the ISO. Depending on your camera you'll usually be fine up to 800 iso. Higher with a good sensor. If that still isn't enough then you can make your aperture wider or boost the ISO even more. IF that still isn't enough you've fallen into a dark well or you haven't realised it's night already so shoot at the best shutter speed you can get and hope for the best. Or bring a tripod.
3. Watch your histogram.
Try to avoid any clipping. Usually not an issue in diffuse lighting though.
4.Keep your lines straight. It helps to use the focus dots in your viewfinder as a grid.
Processing
I do all of my photo processing in Lightroom.
For textures you'll want to
set your white balance
Apply lens corrections to get rid of vignetting and distortion
tweak exposure
Apply sharpening
Noise reduction if you used a high ISO
The aperture you'll want to use will depend heavily on distance to object. If you're very close to a small object, F8 may not give wide enough DOF, so some areas will be out of focus, so you may need to go down to F16 or so. For large objects that are further away, F4 may be perfectly suitable. Its important to note that diffraction will cause blurring, in simple terms, this is because when you aperture size is very small, it's like looking through a screen door. On M43rds, this is generally around F8 and lower, on APS-C, F11, on FF, F16 or so. So be careful stopping your lens down too much when you don't need to.
Also, with the basic kit lens, usually you will want to stop it down 1 stop to get to the sharpest range, while stopping down more than 1 or 2 stops starts putting you into diffraction territory, though, if you have a complex object with lots of depth, you'll want to maximize DOF at the cost of diffraction. All of this is stuff you should experiment with.
A prime lens such as 50/1.8, or a macro lens such as a 50/2.8 tend to be good choices, macro lenses are designed to have even sharpness across the frame, whereas faster primes and especially inexpensive zoom lenses will typically be sharp in the center but not the corners of the frame.
A tripod is also a good idea if you want the best sharpness/quality to your images, especially if your camera/lens doesn't have image stablization. A tripod will enable you to keep your ISO low (which means less noise, better detail, and better dynamic range) while using slow shutter speeds (I assume most things you want texture reference of don't move). You should always shoot at base ISO where possible, usually ISO 100 on APS-C dslrs.