PDA

View Full Version : Procedural texturing?

marque-pierre
11-21-2005, 11:49 AM
I understand that we will see more procedural stuff in next gen games texturing, so I want to pick up that tool as well. Are there any knowledgable people here who have worked with creating procedural textures of any kind?

I was thinking of learning DarkTree, because apart from proprietary tools from games developers it seems like the best tool out there. Am I wrong?
EricChadwick
11-21-2005, 01:33 PM
It is one of the best, IMO.

As for in-game procedurals, the ones that are created on-they-fly, they are mostly pretty simple.
soulburn3d
11-21-2005, 03:42 PM
I don't know anything specific about procedurals and games, but yes, procedurals can be very helpful when shading, especially when combined with hand painted maps. Darktree is indeed an excellent procedural system, not only does it have a lot of functions but a good interface for combining and modifying them. But can you use darktree procedurals in games?

- Neil
EricChadwick
11-21-2005, 03:47 PM
AFAIK DarkTrees are only supported if they're baked into bitmaps beforehand.

Other procedurals can be generated on the fly in-game, but everytime I've seen it its either been because the game parses renderman shaders and calculates them on the GPU, or because it supports its own procedural shader format.
marque-pierre
11-22-2005, 03:54 PM
Hmmm. I think I might be barking up the wrong tree here. Perhaps the future of texture art in gamerdom is not gonna play out this way anyway... Just want to be prepared, is all.
EricChadwick
11-29-2005, 01:22 PM
Oh, I think it is quite applicable. Procedurals help with generating baked textures at the higher resolutions used these days. And it's good to know the basics when more games use on-the-fly procedurals. But for now, textures generated at render-time are going to be fairly simple.

Here's some info about a real-time cloud system using procedural noise.
http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/models/m_clouds.htm
CGTalk Moderation
11-29-2005, 01:22 PM
This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.