PROCEDURAL EVERYTHIIIIING. Seriously though, Blender's new geo node system has made completely procedural projects not only a possibility, but even made them a practicality.
I’m starting to make 3D game assets (photorealistic sci-fi models). Would u recommend using marmoset for baking or is Blender good enough for this? And what about Quixel and Substance Painter? Im new to the part of texturing, baking etc... if u guys could help me, I’d appreciate it
@@herogamerbr12 definitely you should use substance painter for baking, it's the best, In 2nd position and quite close it will be marmoset I don't think that it's possible to bake with quixel mixer in last position if we put quixel aside it would be blender. You can bake what you want with blender but it's just more annoying complex non ergonomic..
If Blender adds some stuff to it's Shader Nodes, it could be really powerful. People like Ducky 3D and Kristoff Dedene can do wizardry with what's on it right now, there's a lot of potential in it.
One thing to be careful of: make sure you still export the generated texture into a static asset, otherwise you could incur performace penalties that may or may not be significant.
Always performance optimize at the end of your project. The additional flexibility and reduced memory usage might make the purely procedural textures more performant than static assets, and sometimes it may not. Experiment with your team and modify based on results rather than assumptions.
I clicked because I saw Mamimi on the thumbnail and wondered what she had to do with procedural textures. Then saw Genshin gameplay. Lmao you are cultured my guy.
Regarding the background footage I don't think genshin uses procedural textures as it's made up of basically a bunch of prefabs for rocks (as often you can see where one rock object ends and another begins) and a essentially a giant plane for grass you can see this if you go out of the map using glitches that is fun to do
Yeah I've been looking at this pretty closely and I'm very sure that while they might have used procedural textures in the pipeline, they were made into image textures instead of being procedural during gameplay. They might have some kind of post-processing effect for the different areas in the game to slightly alter the hue's. Cities use most likely a trimsheet/texture atlas workflow
oh and the reason why I think this is that they could have used triplanar mapping for example to hide uv-seams in the rocks and the seams are visible everywhere
Procedural is a tool in the toolbox. Learn it, use it where it is useful, but it doesn't replace non-procedural methods. If your game world project requires hundreds of different rock variations then project management and art direction probably have bigger problems XD Didn't realize I had just been click-baited into watching a commercial.
I've been saying that we need to cut down on download/HD size and be able to make more content faster with procedural textures. I'm glad someone else is on the same page. It does require more 'loading' at the front but once in it can work with them much faster especially for accurately drawing at any pixel perfect distance since it's literally drawing it on the fly, not trying to swap a different texture or figure how to blend pixels correctly together.
@@namonaite AI can't be the answer to everything. you can't make a good texture with AI. It's static, you got 0 control on what you make, and this won't be useful for games because you make one texture for one single part of the environment. Your texture needs to be adaptable to various situations with a few parameters, which won't be the case with AI.
@@ibanwar245 AI can. If your lead artist can describe to you in words what needs to be done. Then AI also can understand it and get it done. Such AIs will not be editor based. Dalle 2 is not editor based. It is based on linguistic commands. The only reason why humans are smarter than apes is the same reason why apes are smarter than a rock. It is because neuromorphic computing. That is how our own human language works in the first place. Or anything in our own heads. The thing is that AI can learn. The so called learning in machine learning is not just some word that just fits. It is how our own brain learns. It is neuromorphic learning. That is why anything a human can do the AI also will be able to do. I am afraid such AI is inevitable. And this time not only unskilled workers will lose their job. But artist and programmers too.
@@techpriest4787 Great post! IMHO at some point there will be no need even for lead artists. The player can describe what they want to play or be an ultimate game master and describe the game for others. More like a book writer than a technician. It will be a paradise for celebrities, because AI is also great at improving text, so even an idiot will be able to create elaborate descriptions in someone else's style and make game/movie/comicbook out of it ;) (I recommend reading the memes that ai generates - brilliant!). And all changes can be made instantly. There is no need to analyze data and think about what to do next. AI can adapt much faster, do an AB test and choose the more effective option. We already deliberately block the speed of AI in games like starcraft to pretend that the player has any chance ;) Everything is just a matter of time and money.
Im trying too learn PBR styles for stylised characters an its tough but defo best thing to remeber is during sculting phase is the best place too plan things for alot of is! Man a deep cruve or scratchy effect is so fun too use.
@@Andy.R50 Well, no, i use one material pretty much for everything that has one texture on it. This texture is a grid of loads of colors, this saves memory while playing
When I make anime character models I like to start texturing the hair by creating a basic toon shader that uses a gradient, cell shading, and a bit of ambient occlusion, then bake that to an image to do manual touch ups like adding highlights
how about creating an entire biome of rocks using the same procedural texture and variation masks? even breaking UV seams with geometry patches with alpha blend and using this same set of textures to map terrain amazing, but that's what they achieve in Zelda Breath of the Wild where the biomes are more than decorative they are sustainable and everything in a platform as limited as the Switch and it is something that Nintendo is using from its previous old school video games, now with virtual textures and dynamic lighting. learning Geometry Node has been the door to being able to develop all these techniques that were previously inhumanly impossible through traditional modeling
Procedual Textures do take up more computing power. This should be noted. Depending on scenes in Blender, having a lot of procedual textures with fine detail can bump up the Storage/RAM/Computing time quiet a bit. While Blender is made to render things over several minutes, hours or days, a real time game engine would only suffer from big procedual textures. Unless you bake those procedual textures for the finished game, in that case nothing matters and procedual texturing is flawless.
@@shinjite06 They are a realtime thing in Blender. You can create and edit textures on the go while editing models, no problem. If you bake them or not is up to you. Rendering procedual textures takes quiet some performance, if your materials are highly detailed. Especially Noise textures take alot
In 30 years from now this whole process could probably be automated even further... Just look at how far nueral networks have come and i doubt the gaming industry wont heavily continue to implament that technology. We might even get to a point where algorythms fully build parts of games just based on text prompts and existing libraries / references.
My dream is to be able to create my own textures, although I doubt I can make it come true... Well, several months ago I could only dream of being able to do 3D modeling for a character & the outfits... Now I can do that already, but for now I can only give my models the basic color/metalness/roughness... I know I can download some textures online... but I also want to be able to do every little thing by myself... It's more about boosting my skill for a personal satisfaction rather than just "get the job done quick"...
I feel like this will just be standard as games get bigger and more complex in the future as well as other forms of procedural development techniques and maybe even some machine learning applied to stuff as well.
I agree this is very cool and a quick hack! but there's just something about someone hand drawing everything that gives it so much more value in my opinion. I know that's not the point you made, but just wanted to mention it anyway :3 side note: this is really great for people who don't have time or the skills to hand draw details like that as good as a program, thanks for the useful info! :D
and for the low low low low low price of only $300 you too! can utilize this power! Did I mention the low low low low practical, and affordable price, that everyone can afford of a mere $300!!!!
Now we just need a module in unreal that takes in a procedural texture project file and lets you set the parameters and generate the textures at runtime so our game sizes dont balloon from having 3000 copies of a single rock texture with slight differences
You can already do this to a certain degree by making a material that tiles a noise in different ways per instance. Make a few variables like tiling and hues exposed and you're set to make a ton of variations just by instancing the material. All you need to do is export your procedural texture's main components as images and rebuild it as a UE material. I'm not sure if the words I'm using are exact since I've been working in Unity for the past year, so its been a little while since I touched unreal, but the concept should be applicable.
thanks, can you make videos with more technical explanations please? and maybe a tutorial on how to achieve genshin-like shading with unity urp? thank you for reading
Baking is also important to reduce calculation time. Procedural textures (especially for very complex materials) are very difficult to calculate in real time. And we don't need infinite resolution all the time. For games with simple graphic (like Genshin Impact) procedural textures might work well. But for games with more photorealistic graphic, procedural textures would greatly impact performance. But baking, allows graphic designers to make procedural textures, and then bake it into standard texture with desired resolution. The second thing is, often making good procedural texture take more time than making texture by hand. I find it a good compromise, to make texture by hand and add imperfections with procedural texturing. But proportion changes depending on project. I don't imagine texturing a vast word of MMO like Genshin Impact by hand.
this is kindof untrue for many cases, GPUs tend to be limited by memory bandwidth, so a complex PBR setup that has things like normal, metallic, and subsurf maps would be better calculated in a realtime shader although most artists wouldnt be able to work like this, and texturing makes the workflow easier for everyone with less room for error
@@khlorghaal Yes, that is true, that in many cases GPU memory is limiter (Especially for big scenes). For those cases, procedural textures might greatly increase the quality of textures and their quantity with "relatively" low memory usage. I never denied it, I only mentioned calculation speed as a resource. But of course, in real situations, it will be often a balance between those two. But I wouldn't call Normal, metallic, roughness, albedo and subsurface complex. Almost all PBR materials use those (except subsurface as only some materials use it.). The complexity of procedural material comes with generating noise textures and doing mathematical operations on them. Doing photorealistic PBR material of complex material requires a lot of noise and operations. And in the end, it put a lot of strain on computing power and results in FPS (both for games and rendering). In conclusion, in those cases, in my experience, it's better to bake also normal/roughness/albedo/Metalic of those very complex materials to trade memory for speed. But in an example like that video: Genshin Impact, the material is simple enough, that it doesn't take as much computation power. And therefore can be easily generated procedurally with noise and smart mathematics.
@@AllExistence we already have this “ai”. it’s scripts and smart textures, but I assume you don’t know enough about ai or 3D art enough to differentiate
@@AllExistence hell, we even have the ones that generates models and textures for trees, grass, buildings, etc. it’s already existed. It’s not 2 years ago, it’s 10 or so. And yet here we are.
This video could also be called "how to texture when you're so inept at drawing, you can't even make a legible stick figure". Because this is how i texture, because i can't even play hangman and make it look right.
I'll be disappointed if I can't do something like this by 2026: /imagine prompt: low poly stylized rock with PBR textures --variants=200 --lowpoly --gameready And then tweak the prompt to get what I want.
It's the year 2045, I still use Blender because: - It's free? - Substance requires expertise of at least 45+ years in order to barely use it "properly", first hour in, and was struggling doing pretty hard stuff such as rotating the camera, or like panning xD (Yea I guess I'm also kinda not compatible with the software)
This is probably a dumb question but meh. Does the Material Instance in Unreal count as procedural texturing? I’m slow when it comes to understanding terms and whatnot. Thank you in advance!
Hey man, just letting you know, may wanna throw a warning up for those purchasing your Environment Artist course. At the moment, I'm getting a warning on Blendswap saying it's down due to losing it's security certificate. I can't get the Blender brushes for sculpting.
While true, famous studios still have the luxury of still being extremely nitpicky, like who doesn't want to be in these studios. They still look for talent, especially head-hunting from their competitor. This easiness will be more apparent to smaller to middle sized studios, where them buying out studios are very low.
You cannot export them directly, you can just try to recreate the procedural material in UE. However, since UE is missing some features, like fe detecting curvature (currently there is no real curvature shader, that you could use), some maps or masks have to be baked. If you manage to get those masks, then you can create a procedural material in UE, that should work quite similar. A true export would only be possible, if UE had the same nodes and possibilities, that others programs use (but then you could drop those other programs and create everything in UE ^.^ )
@@brainshack9077 Sounds like a new plugin, since most cases i came across were about Quixel Mixer and Unreal, and that one bakes the textures, it does create completely procedural materials in UE. So i would assume, Substance painter bakes them as well, becausei haven´t heard anything about a real curvature shader for UE (just about screenspace shaders, but those are prety useless, since they are just post process shaders). i wonder how the UE master material for this Substance plugin looks like (if its more or less a copy of the Quixel Mixer material, or truly procedural). Edit: Ok, this seems to be an pretty old plugin, from what i cn find on youtube, but it looks like the Quixel Mixer solution, where it bakes the most textures and masks, and then gives you some sliders for adjusting in UE.
hi I have many question about procedure texture and substance painter 1. can procedure texture work on low end pc/laptop?? 2. I tried learning substance painter but i can understand cuz some time when i open substance painter, its completely different as what I see on video. I tried watching ur video still I could not learn the basic 3. It gives out warning that my graphic card is low, is it still okay to use??? 4. Is there any good and fresh video where they can teach me how to use substance painter basic??? I hope u reply, thanx in advance for giving us free knowledge.
1. Procedural textures definitely take more processing power, but that's a field of optimization with a lot of people working on it. 2. Perhaps you can find text documentation? You'll still need to find stuff but it'll be easier to go at your own pace. 3. I think you'll want to look around for more lightweight alternatives. Generally open source stuff will provide better quality end-results while being way more optimized. I just looked up substance painter and yeah no-one has a computer good enough for Adobe software to run good lmao. 4. I dunno I just looked it up. Godot on the other hand has good procedural texturing tools built in and good documentation on using them.
I wanna use Blender so, Should I buy legion 5 with Rtx 3050 or rtx3060. My budget is upto 3050 only but as future proofing concerned I can go for 3060, is it worth it or Rtx3050 is enough. I don't wanna spend over for it.
The RTX 3050 is really bad so I would say only get the 3050 if you must buy right now or cannot save the money. If you do anything else on your computer like play games or make content I would personally prefer waiting to have money for the 3060 even if I had to wait a month or two as the 3060 is a lot better in every aspect.
Well it could probably work for characters that aren't important and have some basic clothing but I guess it would require you to do each body part (legs, feet, arms, hands) in different sessions and you would probably want to use it only a few times so it wouldn't be worth it either way.
Yup. When I personally graduated from University back in 2014, no one had even heard of "Blender", PBR still a brand new and rare trick, and yes - manual UV unwrapping + creating your textures in Photoshop were still indeed the "norms". Just goes to show how fast this industry has evolved; just 10 years ago, you didn't even have tools like Substance.
