VaM 1.x Improving face textures quality without professional help

[kakashisex]

Hi,

I created a look that I really like, by aggregating and tweaking a bunch of things. Which means that my face textures are a mess: heavy (8K) while not great quality (noise from normal map that looks like huge pores in-game, original diffuse map's quality pretty crappy to begin with, etc.). I'm not a photoshop expert and don't want to seek professionals if I can't do it anonymously (I don't mind paying actually).

So, does anyone know another way to improve my face textures quality? I heard about AI, tried Topaz but couldn't get it right, ChatGPT didn't reeally work...

Any help would be appreciated!

 

[hazmhox]

Texture quality != ( not equal / different from ) resolution.

90% of the job comes from the actual art direction and texture setup. If you want to build up your texture work and the inherent quality of your assets, you need read and learn about properly creating/authoring said assets. In your configuration here : find tutorials about texture painting for skins.

You can find 2048 textures that are way better than 8K textures. By default, 8K textures are not even needed, unless you're doing ultra high quality macro shots. But for general use (realtime scenes and gameplay), 8K is overkill. So the general idea is to get better at creating textures, not indefinitely push the resolution hoping it's gonna look nicer "because moar pixels"

 

[kakashisex]

Texture quality != ( not equal / different from ) resolution.

90% of the job comes from the actual art direction and texture setup. If you want to build up your texture work and the inherent quality of your assets, you need read and learn about properly creating/authoring said assets. In your configuration here : find tutorials about texture painting for skins.

You can find 2048 textures that are way better than 8K textures. By default, 8K textures are not even needed, unless you're doing ultra high quality macro shots. But for general use (realtime scenes and gameplay), 8K is overkill. So the general idea is to get better at creating textures, not indefinitely push the resolution hoping it's gonna look nicer "because moar pixels"

Thanks for your reply.

I get that resolution doesn't equate quality, that's why I mentioned "heavy 8K." I plan to scale them all down to at least 4K, if not 2048 as you said.

Maybe I misunderstood your reply, but I'm not looking for creating new face textures. I already have existing face textures that are perfect for my look, except the quality (noise in the normal, lack of skin details in some areas of the diffuse, etc.).

So there's no automatic tools to improve that besides picking up Photoshop tutorials? Which I don't mind either but if there's a quick tool I'd rather take that.

 

[hazmhox]

I'm simply answering in a "neutral" way if you prefer: high quality textures come from artists using their talent to create them.

There is no automated way to compensate for that. It's like asking if there's a tool to learn in three days how to play guitar like Jimmy Hendrix
And in the case of using existing textures and improving them without going through the painting process, not tool exist either.

AI Upscalers will also probably/maybe/sometimes even make it worst, as they are hallucinating details and depending on your setups, even making them sharper (which can be bad for some textures).
And finally the normal map not being an image but vector information, it's pretty much impossible to "improve them" if you don't have the source files ( LP/HP normal baking or painter projects with the original layers ).

Yeah, texturing is a pain in the ass ^^

 

[SlimerJSpud]

I would say the best approach to this would be to mix and match from existing texture sets. If you have a Diffuse set you like, try removing the normals that came with it, or swapping them with normals from another texture set. Same with gloss and specular. I agree that 8K textures are overkill. Why people publish with 8K dependencies is beyond me.

I've done some texturing on the low end of the scale. I did a shaved version of Monique, and a Futa Monique. That's more like texture blending than creation. It was still a PITA.

 

[Origin69]

Just to expand on what hazmhox said about normal maps, you can't treat them as images that you can blend together, as the r/g/b channels are used to give information about surface details; showing what direction the light that hits them should appear to bounce off at. If you just try to blend/layer them up, they will look flat and weird. If you want to blend two maps together, you need to do some vector math in blender and texture bake the result.

If the normal maps are free/CC-BY licence I would be happy to edit and combine them for you.

However, if the normal maps you are starting from have noise/artifacts or defects, there isn't much you can do to clear them up.
(-after thought-) There are some normal to height map converters. In theory you could convert the normal map to a black and white height map, make any alterations/adjustments, and then convert them back to normal maps. I've never actually tried to do that, but it seems plausible now that I'm thinking about it.


This is the setup I use to combine normal maps in blender if anyone is interested. (Don't ask me what or why. As far as I'm concerned it's just wizard shit that I copied down a while back.)

@hazmhox - Some day soon they'll figure out how to implant skills into peoples brains. It won't take three days to play like Jimmy, it'll be instantaneous, like Neo learning kung fu. That will truly be the death of creativity. If everyone is special, then nobody is.