Good day once again!
After having seen what the Real Displacement Textures are all about, it is time for us to see how we can actually make them. Going from taking hundreds of pictures to the creation of the actual textures is a long and sometimes complicated process, so it’s good to know what lies ahead.
So let’s get on with it! The first step has to do with preparing and collecting our data. Usually, lots of pictures are required to process all the information, and taking them is our first assignment. But how do we take them? Focused, overlapped and perpendicular to our target.
They have to be focused, because sharp images are easier for our processing computer programs – like Agisoft – to compute. For the same reason, they should overlap, so there’s matching points in a lot of photos to compare. Finally, it’s better if we shoot perpendicular to the surface of our target at each given point, so we don’t get distortions when we are working with our final model. Oh, and having said that, shoot a lot of them!
After that, we’ll take our data to a program like Agisoft or Reality Capture, where we’ll refine our shots and we’ll finally get the model we’re after. When we have that, it’ll be refining time. It’s going to be a process of back-and-forward between several applications, such as Agisoft, ZBrush, Maya… and that’s because we are going to work at various resolutions.
Having several models serves a purpose – some of them will be suitable for a gaming environment (low poly), while others (the highly detailed ones) will be handy for ripping some fine precision textures from them, that we can later use on those low poly versions. We’ll take a deeper look at those processes later on, but keep in mind that there’ll be many versions of the same model in the future.
After that, we’ll be ready to start creating the textures. depthmaps, ambient occlusion, color rendering, bump mapping, normal mapping, reflection amount, highlight glossiness, roughness… All of them combined will give us the needed information to recreate all of the extreme detail found in nature in a much simpler mesh, saving us a lot of computer processing time and having a viable option to use this kind of complexity in a video game environment or a real time architectural visualization. To create them, we’ll have to do some extra steps: baking of our models and textures, tiling them, do multiple render passes and generating extra data… Sounds like a lot, but we’ll get there and see eventually find out that it’s not so daunting.
So that’s the pipeline! Yes, it’s a bit simplified, but we’ll have time to delve deeper in each and every single step further down the road. In any case, it’s always helpful to have in mind what our road ahead is, and as soon as possible we’ll start discussing what the next steps are. Until then, see you next time!
Brais Brenlla 