Creating photogrammetry based PBR texture of tree bark

[@danecustance2734]

Thanks this was my first look at photogrammetry and this tutorial made it enjoyable.

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

Thank you Dane, I am really happy to hear that :), Cheers!

[@aldoguzman97]

I learned so much, and without any words being said. When your channel grows Ill say I was the 461st person to subscribe. Loved this vid, Keep it up.

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

I am very happy to hear that .. and to get 461st subscriber :)

[@dustinedward5280]

you prolly dont give a shit but if you're bored like me during the covid times you can stream all of the latest movies on InstaFlixxer. Have been watching with my girlfriend recently =)

[@mariotyler3898]

@Dustin Edward yea, have been watching on InstaFlixxer for since november myself :)

[@beckettxander4225]

@Dustin Edward yup, been using instaflixxer for since november myself :D

[@MrSnoops3d]

Excellent video! great workflow thank you for sharing this!!

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

Thanks mate, I am really happy to hear that :)

[@esk6a]

Thanks, man! This was really helpful!

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

Thanks, glad to hear that :)

[@HungViet-rz7kl]

Waiting for your new book. Finish it soon please!

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

I was planning to release it within nextyear or two as I still need to do some research to make it fully comprehensive :)

[@mehmetkilic1995]

Great example! Thank you so much.

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

You are welcome Mehmet, super happy to know someone found here something useful :D

[@mehmetkilic1995]

@@GrzegorzBaranArt We are KZbin miners :)

[@ChristiansD]

This is really cool

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

Thank you Christian :). Appreciated

[@carlossuarez9272]

Hi Gregorz, I'm trying to follow this tutorial, but on the unwrap cylinder part I'm having trouble with that. I am a Blender 2.80 user and I don't know how to map the UV on the cylinder mesh in Blender the way it looks to you in 3Dmax.

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

Maybe the first video I made will help you a bit: kzbin.info/www/bejne/nYGloqWiirFkfZo It doesnt really need to be cylinder to capture the bark properly. Regading the Blender approach, just bring CYLINDER (Shift+A -> Mesh -> Cylinder) and scale it up in top down axis 2.5 times. Add few loops if needed, remove the top and botom face (cap), move to UV view and process smart UV projection. If cube proportions are fine it should work and fill full UV nicely. Even if it is not perfectly aligned, you can still fix edges after baking in Substance Painter with the Clone Tool. Hope that helps. Cheers!

[@carlossuarez9272]

@@GrzegorzBaranArt Thanks Grzegorz for your fast and complete replies. I did something different. I applied the UV "Smart UV's" over the Cylinder and in the UV Editor i organized each vertex/edges until match with the entire box boundaries. This way I can use the complete Cylinder or just the middle depending of the Bake Texture Surfaces. To make the hollow cylinder I made a cufflink and modified its measurements and then applied a Bolean modifier. This type of Unwrap can provide very exactly results. Finally, I had forgotten to invite you to take a look at my latest PBR work based in height photogrammetry method using your guidness. As always I would like to have the opinion of a specialist and experienced veteran like you. I built my own Photogrammetry equipment in a very traditional way, even recycling some things that I no longer used, of course keeping your knowledge and advice on the matter. Some time ago you advised me to work better on texture seams and I did. Hopefully you can take a brief moment to check my evolution and may be give me another good advice. I opened my Artstation page inspired by these works. www.artstation.com/carlossuarez Best regards and take care of yourself.

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

@@carlossuarez9272 I am not very good with Blender .. at least not yet, so I believe there might be better way to unwrap the texture to the one I suggested. Regarding the scan you made on Artstation, looks very interesting. I love how you marked the area for scanning. Your setup seems very interesting.. thanks for sharing the procees on your page. Regarding the subject.. I wouldnt pick a grass as a first subject to play with as this is one of the the toughest surfaces you can pick and the final result is always a kind of compromise :). Good luck with scanning, imo you are doing great. Cheers!

[@rudy1023]

Dzięki, bardzo przydatny filmik :)

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

Nie ma sprawy, milo mi to slyszec :)

[@ricardogoncalves7043]

Hello... How much time in hours does all process takes? More or less... Thanks

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

Depends on the subject, workflow, tools but also technique used. For photogrammetry I would say a working day per material is fine but when you scan in practice it doesnt work this way. So when you go to the location you scan many materials. So it takes time to go somewhere and come back. It takes time to set up the gear for scanning, charge batteries, sometimes get consent for scanning, but at the same time you scan many materials in certain location and process them later. Some scan takes 10 minutes to capture, some 20, some even 30. I wouldnt rush scanning process and take my time since it pays back later. I would say it might take even 20-30 to scan high quality grass. Regarding the data processing time .. it depends on the hardware used. Might happen on your laptop scan after scan or on a dedicated server overnight in batched process etc. In first case it takes all your processing power, in a second you hit the button and got the result quite quickly if was processed by a dedicated render farm. But to simplify and take an average: 10-15 mins to scan something + 10-60 mins for photo editing depending on setting and amount of images + 1-6h for reconstruction + 1-10 mins for lowpoly and + 5-30mins for texture baking + 2-10 mins for tiling. Everything depends on details. Baking can take 4 minutes if you use GPU acceleration but if you have super heavy mesh which fills 100GB of RAM and use just CPU .. baking AO might take even a day. It can take you a day to go to the certain location, or a few days.. or an hour. Tiling can be very easy and straight forward or very tricky. Many steps can be fully automated or half automated. An ArtEngine can tile material in 1 minute while it can take 1 hour to tile it manually in Substance Painter. But for some materials you need to spend 1 hour in ArtEngine building structure mask while manual tiling with Painter would take just 30 mins etc. But to summarise, the entire process from start to finish can take from 3 hours to even 24 hours. On average if you ask me I would consider 1 working day as a safe time frame per high quality generic material. There were times when I managed to make 2-3 materials per day, and times where I struggled with one for 3 days. Hope that makes sense but there is no simple answer on this one and a lot depends on the subject, captured data quality and automatisation.

[@ricardogoncalves7043]

@@GrzegorzBaranArt , watching your videos I'd thought: no way to make this all process just a few hours. You do your job very carefully and this take much more time than make a texture in the anyway. But i am happy to understand the all good process about photogrammetry that you do. Thanks for your sharing. Help us a lot 😄👍

[@paranormalgamesstudios]

How to make an accurate spec map roughness and gloss from the scans? I didnt see you create these maps.

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

I do, check my other tutorials, like this one: kzbin.info/www/bejne/p2G3koWYqapnrrc (13min and something). I created my own substance fle to speed up the process. I simply use combined information from baked maps and it works. I do it exactly the same way when I create pure substance materials. And again, all the details and file itself is available as a part of my ebook ;). Hope that helps.

[@gamma2.2]

I dont understand why the height map from tha baking process is mostly broken ??

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

It is usually broken for surfaces with low level of high difference compared to surface covered and I assume since baked height fills entire 16 bits RGB range, it emphasizes slight inaccuracy in lowpoly positioning. Its still a guess, need to process a dedicated test to to be sure, will do it when have some time to spare.

[@gamma2.2]

@@GrzegorzBaranArt I'm not going to pretend I understand everything ;) But I have a different issue, where the height map has a gradient pattern on it, I'm guessing it's because the highpoly is round compared to lowpoly . I'm doing it in xnormal. Maybe it should be like this but when I look at the height maps from other people, I don't see those gradients at all. Wonder what's that all about?

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

@@gamma2.2 As I mentioned before, the main reason for getting this gradient is micro-misalignment. As this is quite common issue. I will cover that with my next material breakdown soon: www.artstation.com/gbaran/albums/86576 (probably this weekend) and in a future will update my ebook and probably record a new free video where I am going to cover it :).

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

@@gamma2.2 Here you have the promissed material where I made the lowpoly model which gave me perfect height map without getting any weird gradients across: www.artstation.com/artwork/RYlOme hope that helps :D

[@StuartWilson4d]

Just curious but doesn't holding the camera while on a tripod negate the cable release benefits?

[@GrzegorzBaranArt]

Depends. If I would set 2sec delay after I press the shutter button on the camera I would say YES. I can remove cable remote from the process. And of course this is something definitely worth to consider. Pushing physical button on the camera always causes camera's micro-movement. The result is more noticeable the more zoom (higher focal length) we use. It might blur even few pixels so in result you can always lose some details and add more randomness into entire series. If you are aiming in quality, for photogrammetry every pixel matters. Also it is good to know that tripod itself is not made from stone and also moves. Very often is affected by wind and needs additional weight to compensate it. So .. helps a lot, definitely brings quality up but doesn't do all the job. There is also the other option if your camera has a touch screen and this is the one I used a lot before: I used to release the shutter using camera's touch screen, simply by slightly touching it. But even in this case I also set 2 sec delay for shutter release. So to answer your question, I used remote to speedup the capture as without it I would set 2sec delay for shutter release (especially that I used 60mm focal length and in these lighting conditions average exposure time was around 1/40) and entire capture would take a bit longer. For 160 images it is if I am not wrong.. 5 minutes saved? Hope that makes sense :)