Rock - Photogrammetry based Environment Texture
Another rock scan. Since Substance Designer baker was totally broken after previous update I used this as an opportunity to do some tests on alternative bakers. I picked Knald, Marmoset Toolbag3 and XNormal and I can confirm that Substance Designer baker is still the best I used so far and I was really happy when broken baker received fix last week :).
To remove seams I used Artomatix. It does really great job, unfortunately has no any shadow removal tools yet. So far I can confirm that more PBR tools are coming .. especially the shadow removal node, but since any of them is included yet I used Substance Designer's 'AO Cancellation' node to remove AO shadows. Also this time I experimented a bit more with ambient occlusion shadow removal.
This is my photogrammetry workflow - this time I continue my experiments with 'Artomatix', so far it made PS totally redundant and and left less worrk to Substance Design (more details regarding to my workflow at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/K0PYG)
The Source - me as scale reference :), captured area marked with green
The source - captured area preview
The source - surface details with my shoe as scale reference
The reference image with the Color Checker I used to calibrate color in PhotoLab
Metashape (successor of Photoscan) - 3D reconstruction based on 80 images.
ZBrush - I created two lowpoly planes to bake two different parts of the same rock surface.
I expect they will blend together very well when I use mask etc. in a future
Marmoset Toolbag 3 Baker - test - it does job pretty well but I dont like the results I get from it. Those from Designer works better for me.
XNormal - reliable, shitty interface ;P and broken baking workflow, average speed but still much slower to Designer. Decent results except the heightmap and AO which suck. I believe if I would spend more time on scale setting AO would be better.
Substance Designer Baker - the fastest, the most reliable, great results .. definitely THE WINNER :D. FInally I decided to bake everything in Substance anyway
Artomatix ArtEngine - graph I created to tile the material (in 2D view you can see fast mask which tells AI to remove marked areas during reconstruction process). Entire seam removal process takes seconds. Another upside is awesome heightmap quality.
Ambient shadow removal in Substance Designer done on baked Diffuse map with baked Ambient Occlusion map as shadow information input for 'AO Cancellation' node
..and the final 1k material preview