Using 3D Scans in Artomatix to Create Seamless Materials

Pete Mc Nally has recently published a post on his experiment with the tool.

Have you tried working with 3D scans in Artomatix to create materials? The tool is not procedural, like Substance Designer, but it uses an interesting example-based approach, letting users create variations of a texture or generate multiple textures simultaneously. Pete Mc Nally has recently published a post on his experiment with the tool. Let’s check out the artist’s results to find out about the tool’s advantages.

With all this time indoors I’ve had some time to process scans and create materials and put Artomatix through its paces. Based here in Dublin, the Artomatix app is currently in an alpha state, but already functional and promises to automate “the most time consuming, repetitive tasks creating time for artists to focus on what really matters,” – music to my ears. It’s not procedural, like Substance Designer, but uses a different approach, example-based creation. I’ve run a few scans through the software already, mainly for “texture mutation” which creates variations of a texture or multiple textures simultaneously as part of a material, and also for seam removal, making textures tile. These automatic processes can be controlled somewhat by moving jitter sliders and painting ignore masks, handy for removing blurry areas or scan artifacts. This could be really useful for making partial or unsuccessful scans usable as world textures.

The first of this series of materials from scans was some earthen rubble (blogged about previously here) in a wheelbarrow I shot on my phone one afternoon. The scan itself worked quite well in places but needed a lot of filling in, and of course, parts of the wheelbarrow removed. This would usually have to be done manually in Photoshop or Substance Painter. I imported the textures into Artomatix as a material and connected up Texture mutation and Seam Removal nodes and after a few minutes of communicating with the cloud, my textures were ready to preview.