Seamless Stones…
In my last post I said I’d have to stop posting rock materials up here, but this is an old post that I’d forgotten to publish 🙂 I started this blog post on Thursday 1st March 2018, the evening when “Storm Emma” and “The Beast from the East” clashed over Ireland causing blizzard like conditions and Wintry landscapes not seen in this country since 1982. Public transport was suspended, many people were off or working remotely and the public were advised to stay indoors until the Red Weather Alert lifted later that week. So, with extra time indoors I had some time to process scans and create materials, and put Artomatix through it’s paces. As you may have seen on this blog, I’ve run a few scans through the software already, mainly for “texture mutation” which creates variations of a texture, or multiple textures simultaneously as part of a material and also for seam removal, making textures tile. These can be controlled somewhat by moving jitter sliders and painting ignore masks, which is very handy for getting rid of blurry areas or scan artifacts.
The first of these seamless materials from scans was some beach pebbles I shot on my phone in the shade of a cliff a few weeks back. The scan itself worked in places but is noisy throughout and needed a lot of filling in, which would usually have to be done manually in Photoshop or Substance Painter. I used 3dsmax to bake diffuse, normals, height and AO and hand painted roughness in Photoshop. Artomatix was used for seam removal and cleaning bits of seaweed and areas that hadn’t been captured well enough to use. Here is the result applied to a plane primitive in Toolbag 3:
Wireframe (with PN triangle tesselation, displaced from a plane primitive)
I took all 5 textures into Toolbag to test how they responded to PBR lighting
And here is the real-time material applied to a sphere in Sketchfab
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