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[Trese759]

Good evening, I'm new to the world of texturing and I have some questions about creating realistic non-procedural materials.

I created a texture for a wooden bridge and I wondered what was the best way to make it realistic. First I created a square texture on Substance Designer (SD_Wood).

Once applied to the model on Blender it is repeated several times and I do not really like the result (Blender_Tilable).

I then imported the texture on photoshop to customize it a little (4096 x 1024) (PS_Custom).

Now the result is more pleasant (Blender_Custom).


My questions are:

1. Is this the best solution?

2. Are there any other ways to get this kind of result?

3. If this is the best solution, how can I regenerate the normal map, height map, ao, roughness etc. ?

4. From a theoretical point of view a non-square texture, but that is still 2^, is not recommended or can be used for the development of a videogames?

Thanks in advance for any clarifications.

Have a nice day!

[muki]

This is not ideal for games because of the sheer size (4k x 1k) of the texture. It isn't that modern hardware can't handle the resolution, just inefficient.

On an open-world project (not indie) I recently worked on, we use masks to vary the type of wood (and other materials), to break repetition and get the same kind of variation you want. To recreate your wood surface but our techniques, we would would use something like these textures:

wood_a (diffuse, normal, spec)
wood_b (diffuse, normal, spec)
wood_a_b_mask (black & white)

wood_a and wood_b are two tilable kinds of wood, one painted and the other just raw wood. the magic comes from the mask texture, which is a lower resolution "representation" of which planks are painted wood and which are raw, along with some noise/grunge/chips in the mask to make it more natural.

The key here is that your masks needs to be able to be tiled differently than your woods. Here's a quick illustration that will hopefully help.



In this example for every time the mask is tiled horizontally, the square wood textures are tiled 4 times. The resolution of the mask is also different, but because this just masks between two high resolution wood textures, it doesn't matter so much. It of course means the game engine needs a material that uses masks and flexible tiling/scaling between textures.

I worked on several games that use these kinds of materials. It worked for us, because with just a few different kinds of wood textures and a couple black & white masks loaded in memory, we can create dozens of different wood materials with different levels of paint chipping, different colors, etc. A lot of creativity can be had with shared textures and masks!

But it also means that if your scene has a single wood object, then this technique probably isn't as efficient.