Hi There,

lately I have been interested in how to create PBR Materials. PBR are means basically - Materials that behave physically correct. The concrete texture pack was a good start to get familiar with creating textures. However, i couldnt apply my workflow of creating concrete textures to create wooden textures.

For me personally, its important to have large areas covered without tiling when it comes to concrete facades. But wood is more about detail and reflection and so on. So i learned a lot about photogrammetry in the past 2 years.

Photogrammetry is basically a scan that you create from a set of photos.

The better the photos, the better the scan. So the first thing you need to consider when creating PBR Materials is:

Equipment I was shooting with a sony alpha 7 R II and a ring flash attached to it. You need a homogeneous light obviously to create a texture that is even lit. And it gets even better if you have no visible shadows on your images. Below you can see the Rig.
Tools So now you have about 150 to 300 images. The more images you make, the denser the scan gets - the better the texture. Its that easy. I was now using Reality Capture to align those images. There is also some other Photogrammetry tools, but i really like RC and its simple workflow.
Ok, so we are halfway through now :-) Now you somehow need to get a texture out of this 140mio Polygon scan. This is where "baking" comes into play. Baking is the process of approximating complex surface effects as simple 2D bitmaps and then assigning them to objects. So in a nutshell: we take our highpoly scan to Zbrush and put a lowpoly plane on top of our scan.
This way we can project all the details from our highpoly scan to a lowpoly UV mapped square plane. It sounds a bit confusing to be honest if you are not familiar with the concept of baking. But dont get confused. Its actually quite easy. Now we have two things. Our highpoly scan and the lowpoly plane. We can use a baker now that helps us to extract maps from these two items. I was working with xnormal. Its a free tool that does the trick perfectly.
And its quite an experience since the interface feels like you are back in the year 2001 :-)
Final Retouching Finally we have our maps that we can retouch, relight and make seamless in Photoshop. And once we are happy we can bring our maps in to test them in the renderengine of your choice. Its really nice to see the textures come to life :-)

Thats about it. Let me know if this was helpful and if you have any questions. Have a nice day!

Bests,

Nicolai

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