5 Lichen and moss materials – Photogrammetry Materials - ScansUp Collaboration

° Five seamless materials captured in Ireland. The workflow involves Reality Capture, Zbrush, Substance Painter, and ArtEngine.
° The photogrammetry session had three main objectives (with more to come in the coming weeks):
-Creating a wide range of surfaces to construct a woodland scene. The library showcased in four uploads contains less than half of the recorded dataset.
-Developing a library for scan cleaning purposes.
-Exploring the wide range of tools in ArtEngine to gain confidence in this remarkable software.
° To achieve the first objective, the simplest approach was to capture as many surfaces as possible and process them with a seam-removing flow. It was also necessary to generate a false roughness map to complete the set of maps baked in Substance Painter ( normal, height, bent normal, and thickness maps). ArtEngine's official introduction videos demonstrate a dedicated node for generating roughness from a colour map - the node itself offers useful presets based on Quixel values, while additional sliders provide the freedom to make creative decisions. To create the best map, I used the "feature selection" node. By giving ArtEngine a guiding mask map, I was able to choose the desired selection and the results later serve as a mask for blending maps using nodes.
° The second goal included a highlight of ArtEngine - mutation node. This node utilizes the power of machine learning to create material variations based on user creative decisions (numerous sliders offer a great amount of freedom). With this feature, a wide range of material variations can be generated quickly and easily from a single scan. This approach proves very helpful for achieving seamless material blending when recreating textures for parts of the model that were not adequately captured. ArtEngine emerges as an ideal tool for game developers and designers who need to rapidly create high-quality assets from a single dataset.
° The final goal emerged from countless hours spent exploring the software. My favourite discovery was a shadow mask node (in conjunction with the height map). This node was created to mask part of the texture that could lose information caused by harsh shadows, then in connection with the content-aware node, fill those gaps with synthetic data. From that point, it was natural for me to explore that direction further (I love testing new tools and examining their compatibility with other solutions).
By this point, I had become familiar with and utilized the two most widely used delighting solutions:
-The Unity Delight tool (also recommended in ArtEngine videos)
-The Agisoft Delighting Tool (currently the only tool specifically developed for this purpose and not left alone by developers)
Each one of them provides different results (as they base on different approaches to the same issue. Unity emulates the fake environment from various sets of maps when Agisoft by physically guide possible light position by brush strokes on the 3D model). Both are not ideal, but by combining them, we can recover and repair harsh shadows that would normally stay with our material. Of course, the shadow mask node is not the only tool in ArtEngine’s inventory for fighting with strong shadows. Content-aware fill (with mask), gradient removal node, levels, contrast, high-pass filter, histogram selection (and more) allow for the building of a complete spiderweb of nodes and delight textures and masks to blend them all. Personally, I noticed that the Ambient Occlusion in connection with the histogram node provides the ideal base mask for selecting troublesome areas. I think about sharing some details about workflow, as the amount of ideas and solutions is too large to write about it here (the fact that paragraph took so much space just proves that).
° In conclusion, I have never considered myself a material artist, but tools like ArtEngine and the new baking module in Substance Painter have made the entire process dynamic and enjoyable. The substantial hardware requirements of ArtEngine may elevate blood pressure (often requiring 128 GB of RAM and 24 GB of VRAM to process 8k textures), but the results are worth it. One thing is certain: whenever I decide to capture something, I will not only focus on creating 3D models but also pay attention to the possibility of material creation.