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[ThemsAllTook]

I've been working on learning 3D modeling. I'm at the point with my test model where I'm ready to paint a texture on it, and suddenly I'm having the issue of not knowing how to create that texture. I've found some suitable ones online, but I'd prefer to use my own original work as much as possible.

I seem to recall long ago coming across a tool that could create procedural textures for stuff like wood grain, skin, grass, etc. from adjustable parameters. I don't remember what it was called, and it might not exist anymore, but surely this is a thing people often do? I've googled and found some things that might work, but I'd like to hear recommendations and experiences from other artists who do this sort of thing rather than just pick something at random. Do any of you know of something like this that you could point me to?

[ThemsAllTook]

A small update... I've been looking around, and someone linked me to Substance Designer, which is a pro-level tool that looks pretty darn good. It's pricey and has some invasive license terms though, so as capable as it looks, I don't think it fits for my use case.

Blender also has some built-in capabilities for this. I played with it for a bit, and it seemed fairly basic, but maybe I just don't understand how to use it yet (and the documentation isn't the best). I'll probably poke at this one for a while longer and see if I can get anywhere. If not, I might just end up writing my own tool for this.

[BorisTheBrave]

Blender's not a great tool for this sort of stuff, but it's much better than you think. You want to use the Cycles render engine, not the Blender Internal one.

1) Cycles uses node based composition, so you can produce a much wider variety of effects, tighter control, parameterize things, etc.

2) You can also write shaders in Open Shading Language, and there's a wide variety of free ones available.

3) It understands displacement mapping, you can you make normal and bump maps which match your texture.

Tips:
You can live preview your results by switching the 3d view to Rendered.
After you are done, use Blender's "Bake" feature to make images you can use in your game.

[gimymblert]

Alternative: use code!

Most of procedural texture program are just fancy interface to simple function. You can just compose it in straight code at the expense of rewriting some more function. It's not like most of them aren't documented already or in a free library.

https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SDDOC/Atomic+nodes

You can visually parse the visual programming, write code that does teh same, and build a library over time. And it might be faster than using the node editor anyway.

[Valar05]

Substance Designer is a pretty sweet tool- I've had a lot of fun just making stuff with it.  My biggest problem with using it is just that, because I'm not very good at it, my textures tend to not match each other in style.  Some things will be stylized and simple, some will be noisy and realistic - it's tough for me to tell till I get them in game next to each other.  This is a particular problem with making characters that match their environment, at least for me.

Another thing you can try is photo-sourcing your textures.  That is, literally using a photograph to paint your model - You can basically set the photo up like a giant stencil and just push the color through onto your model's texture.  Assuming you can find or take a photo of your subject matter, all your textures will match in style because they're all from real life.  It can give you a bit of a grungy 90's game look - not to everyone's taste, but I kind of like it.

And of course the thing I do the most because it's the fastest and easiest, just use flat colors and don't really paint anything.  This guy shows off the technique (and has a very soothing voice).  I like this workflow a lot because the only difficult part is choosing a good color palette, and if you do that things will generally look consistent.

[oahda]

I can't remember what it was called, or if it's out, but there was someone developing a graphics application where shader code was used to generate pictures. I'm finding 'Shadron' on Steam, was that it? Windows only tho. And paid, but it's on sale now.

[BorisTheBrave]

Substance Designer users: I gather it has some features that aren't really easily replicable in pixel shaders. Like, e.g. applying a sharpen filter? Is that true, I've not really used the program.

[Valar05]

Substance Designer users: I gather it has some features that aren't really easily replicable in pixel shaders. Like, e.g. applying a sharpen filter? Is that true, I've not really used the program.

It's more of a tool to generate textures than it is anything to do with shaders.  While I'm sure you can change the shader it uses, it's really kind of made to plug directly into the standard shader in Unity/UE/whatever. 

You can either start out with an existing image  and modify it from there, split it out into various PBR maps (albedo, roughness, metallic, etc), or you can procedurally create the texture using various shapes and noises, and layer on effects.  The procedural texture approach is really cool, because you can modify the seed value used to generate them at runtime- and because they're built by algorithm instead of pixels, they're really small on disk, and scale to any resolution. 

Using the program to actually make anything this way is kind of an artistic skill on its own, but it is fun.

[sleekdigital]

Sooo many options for this kind of work...

Substance Designer and Substance Painter are both terrific.  I also like Filter Forge.  It is very pricey but they often have 75% off sales. Most recent sale just ended tho 

https://www.filterforge.com

There is a pretty good similar free program called neotexture.

http://neotextureedit.sourceforge.net/

...kind of awesome for a free app.

It's actually pretty amazing what you can do with procedural stuff in Blender.  This video series might be helpful...




If you really like to work in photoshop then Quixel is a nice option.  On sale now.
https://quixel.se/suite2/

[matriax]

I made a free tool for texture generation, is just a prototype just now but you can do some cool noise textures and export up to 2048x called TexaTool.

Is not a big thing right now but hope adding more stuff in future.