Rocks - Photogrammetry based Environment Texture
A very challenging material with a lot of height complexity. I used just my hands to stabilize the camera as even a monopod didnt work in these conditions. The weather was in constant change so parts of the texture gets shadows cast by direct sun. As you can see in shots I was trying to mitigate shadows but some still left. I used a few techniques to remove them but each affected quality to much. I tried my technique with AO in SD but failed, I tried ArtEngnes AI and failed again, same with the Alchemist. Simple 'Blacks' in Dx0 gave me the best results so far.
These rocks were also a very challenging to tile and I had to use a few tricks to automate the tiling with the ArEngines AI. I think it turned pretty well. Its definitelly not the best material ever, but its a decent one
I followed my standard workflow you can find on my youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/GrzegorzBaranArt
Material was added to my Material Library as 'gb_rocks267'
https://gum.co/WJAQy
PBR preview: Albedo / Normal / Metalness/ Roughness / AmbientOcclusion
Marmoset Toolbag 4 - tiling preview video
Source location - due to surface irregularity I wasnt able to use tripod or even a monopod. Also unfortunately I didnt carry anything to help me with a direct sun and lighting changes but the surface was to interesting to not to capture it.
PhotoLab4 - before I used images for reconstruction I processed them in PhotoLab4. Also in here I reduced power of shadows using BLACKS slider. In here you can see the difference before and after changes.
You can find camera settings in top left corner
Metashape - surface reconstruction based on 108 images.
Zbrush - the low poly model positioned over the high poly one for baking. I used rulers as a scale reference to make sure the coverage is correct.
Substance Designer - these are settings I used to bake PBR texture set from the highpoly model
ArtEngine - to remove seams with the artengine I had to create 2 masks. One for IGNORE so the AI wont bother to reconstruct edge stones, and one as sturucture guide. Here you can see stones with AI should erase and replace with something else.
ArtEngine - the other mask should be used as a sturucture guide for the AI. Basically a PROTECT mask. To do this I combined a 3 different masks. One with edges based on the height map.
but since the AI still struggled with some stones I marked shapes of them so the AI wont break them into pieces trying to create a new one
and to support it I surrounded a few more stones with protective lines. To get more info about the idea you can watch my video in here:
https://youtu.be/atuqYgmp13o
ArtEngine - before the seam removal
ArtEngine - after the AI based seam removal
For those interested, the material has been added to my material's library:
https://gum.co/WJAQy
as 'gb_rocks267'