Senior VFX supervisor and mentor at Animation Mentor, Scott Liedtka, demonstrates a texture creation trick that’s used in production to quickly generate a custom 3d texture. Scott shows you how to take a high resolution image and turn it into a seamless shader with displacement in Autodesk® Maya® using Solid Angle’s Arnold renderer. This technique is great because all the custom maps you create lineup which means they will work perfectly in the 3D package.
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How to create a high resolution texture:
1. Find an image
- High resolution
- Look for evenly lit images
- Crop to square in a power of two: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2056 (e.g 1024*1024px)
2. Use Photoshop to create new maps
- Make it seamless
- Load the color image in for a color map
- Convert to grayscale for the specular map
- Use high contrast black and white for the bump map
3. Open Maya and create a test scene
- Apply your texture to the model
- Map the diffuse
- Map the specular
- Map the bump
