Making my first texture and failing

Before you think this is a tutorial: It is not. It is my experience trying and failing, to create my first texture for 3D.

So I have done things in the past with 3D. Made models and scenes, but never made a texture from an actual photo. There are so many great free and paid recourses for textures that you almost always can find something that fits your need for that one thing in the background. Or when I make a texture from scratch I always made it without using photos. I always think you should learn what is under the hood to understand how it actually works. The best way to learn is by doing it so today I am making my own texture for later use of a brick wall I photographed yesterday. Not aiming to be it a seamless texture yet as I don’t have material shot for that and also the lighting is not perfect, but at least this is a start for now to learn more about the process.

The first thing I did was just skewing it a bit more in photoshop so that it is a bit more square-like. Emulating a perspective that the camera was dead-on “ish”. For a texture to look realistic I figured that the normal map is the most important to work on first, but for some reason within Photoshop the 3D filters were greyed out and only worked after activating OpenCL in the performance tab (Edit -> Preferences -> Performance -> Advanced Settings). Then the next problem arose that my RTX 2070 was not compatible with Photoshop what makes sense as I have swapped versions many times in the past when working on Unreal Engine projects for work-related things. Downloading the latest Game-Ready version of the Nvidia website eventually did the trick to not get the error, but then the 3D preview would not update within Photoshop. Apparently an issue with the current version that you can solve by deactivating the Native Canvas (Edit -> Preferences -> Performance -> Advanced Settings). Looks like even the seasoned Adobe programs still have some bugs to work out, but eventually I got the preview to work, and my normal map generated with just tweaking the settings a little bit and inverting the height (as it is generated from dark, but the bricks are surrounded by light cement).

Eventually doing the same for the bump/height map and tweaking the settings just a little bit that it looks more like I want it to, but also noticing that the original picture is bad for making a texture due to the lighter parts on the wall… Especially generating the bump/heightmap will look crap if you look at the details of it. For my next texture, I definitely need to start with a better suitable picture that takes into account what I am going to make with it.

But this blog is about learning something new every day to advance and inspire creativity. Even if it is learning about mistakes and what I have learned today is mostly about how Photoshop works and how picky it can be for the 3D capabilities. I probably can still use this texture somewhere in the background for one of the scenes I am still planning in my head.