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Did we know everything about realistic texturing?

The most crucial skill and struggle for creating a realistic texture or material in a project, is the knowledge of texture behaviour about real matters. It is important to note that texture behaviour knowledge is not only the description of the reflectiveness and bump values. Knowing the behaviour of textures on edges and and surfaces is also essential for a texture and material artist. 

Let me explain better with these images down below. (These pictures are from Texturing & Modeling Reference - HardSurface  Collection.) 

We can easily notice where exactly the abrasion of a material is most prominent in objects or study how the color of an object changes  by corrosion and overtime.

Generally, when we want to use these abrasion like grunge or stencil maps on a texture, we behave completely aimlessly and always try to find a more beautiful texture relying on tools such as substance generator, Vraydirt or Corona Ao. But first it is very important that we learn enough knowledge and vision of how these elements function and exist in the real world. When this knowledge is obtained, then we can utilise these tools and make them work effectively. 

Let me give you another example from the same collection of images.

Now let me zoom in, a little. These images are high quality and as so I can easily zoom in and show you more details.

Let me give you yet another hint. How can we achieve this knowledge of photoreal details? 

By looking more closely at the real world and real matters, and these little things are what bring your work on top of the line because you now have added some details to your textures that maybe haven't or doesn't cross other people's minds.

Based on the subjects that we specified We have provided a collection of pictures as our Texturing & Modeling Reference - HardSurface that significantly help you grasp useful knowledge about the world of texturing.

300 Texturing & Modeling Reference - HardSurface - VOL 01

Why did the poster shot take 1 week to finalise?

It's a fact that making finale poster of the product is the most complicated part of production and that for this case it has taken 1 entire week to produce. 

100 Ornament Brushes + 3DModel + IMM Brush - VOL 05

I have experienced and seen numerous times that how a high quality and useful product can end underwhelming and go unnoticed with bad poster and representation, whereas a clever and on point poster image can itself even cover up product's weaknesses and make up for a success in the market.

Previously I wrote an article that you can read it in link below, on importance of poster design and the reasons to focus a lot representing your work. 

You can read the previous article here

To summarize my previous tutorial on why one should try to create a good poster, you should pay attention that it's best to help the crowd find out the effectiveness and usefulness of your product using good posters and images that count as real use cases; that to prove if your product is worth, you should first make direct use of it in your representative render shots. 

Where did the story begin?

In this post I'll demonstrate the creation of a poster for one of our products. This process as said before, has took a huge chunk of production time span because first we wanted to exhibit the usefulness, beauty and benefits of our product and second, to be sure that it's all done specially while gathering and repressing all the existing pieces (ornaments) together not relying on just simple forms to do so.

Start first Idea :

You can see how far in the process the concept idea had gone with the below slide. Also It was during ID Color test in this stage that we realised the impropriety of our base concept.

Change the idea:

At this point we came to the conclusion that the initial idea was not good,so we developed another idea that step by step you can see how it has gotten to the final shape.

First you see a base raw clay material and how for future improvements and sense of life, some parts got changes in continuation. 

The making of this poster took nearly a week to amend. 

This is the poster from the vol. 5 of our ornaments collection.

The renders that you see in this post are shots from our recent product Roughness Imperfection .

One important point is that the base working knowledge or simply understanding what tools do in softwares won't necessarily help you create a high quality product; let us give you a concrete example for better understanding .

You plan to create a material or texture classified product. The fact that you do render well with VRAY, Corona or that you can simply come up with a great materials don't ensure what you come up will be a successful product.

Why? Because even if we had completely made our own material, it's that most of the time it is going to be a premade texture that we just used. In addition to that, applying a material is one step after texture creation which requires a solid knowledge on how a texture behaves in real situations while functioning in materials. As an other example, what type of reflective behaviour it should represent to be realistically accurate. This knowledge which often refers to the level of our awareness towards real life texture behaviours is far more valuable than general software skill sets to hit a high quality creation in Textures' category. ( you can see another example here )

The production process of a concept in 3D graphics is that you should build your concept matter with modeling, then you pay attention to it's finish and material which in fact is the process of texturing and shadering. After your product is ready to use, you have to make renders to represent your work to your audience in situations that they might in those cases need your product. When dealing with finish and material, you can't often rely on software libraries to help you and you're most likely want to use more realistic pictures and designs, unique with more diversity. That's also the very reason the use case of premade and ready to use textures is being constantly broadened and made easier.

But before going to find and use a quality texture, you need to know some somewhat general information that we'll now focus to explain and point it's subtleties. A perfect designed, modeled, textured and rendered creation isn't going to be a useful and successful product unless it corresponds to the  audience's needs. It's not all about a way so superficial to boost the speed of others' production that makes it a profitable investment, but also it should be a catalyst to level up the quality aspects that helps people develop their work in general.

Therefore producers should test and make use of their own creation and show the positive results, as an evidence, to people who are willing to invest and upgrade their own works. The market won't buy anything for fun, but for efficiency and you should convince with alive results how your products can help them improve the quality of their materials; that's why we desperately try to convey our products' practicalities in different ways in suitable scenarios.

I personally believe if a product is going to be really successful and come in handy to buy, first it should deliver it's positive results in our own sample cases we bring about as producers.

The last but still a very important tip, is that buyers can't really discover that your product is good and useful easily , it's you that should help them find out with your presentation.

We hope that you'll find these information useful, here we tried to explain people's intentions when they are looking for products and how marketplacers should undrestand and take use of these thought process to first create better products, and then to represent it as best as possible

Milad Kambari