It's very interesting to me that it appears much of CGI/3d animations appears to just be layering many different texture maps on top until it looks realistic enough.
pw123
What tool do people use to create these texture maps/ are they easy to use?
keenan
@jifengy Ok, but you also have to ask: how do you generate those textures? One answer is to have an artist sit down and paint every single layer, but this is extremely tedious/time consuming, and doesn't scale to many models, animated textures, etc. So, people (like you!) have to invent algorithms for automatically generating the attributes you want to visualize. For instance, how and where does the sweat drip down the face over time? To answer this question, you might go so far as to solve a partial differential equation (PDE) governing the evolution of a thin film of liquid over the surface, as in this paper.
keenan
@pw123 Some people use standard 2D paint programs (like Adobe Photoshop); others use tools that allow you to paint directly on the surface (like ZBrush). Though as mentioned to @jifengy above, it often takes way too much work to paint everything by hand---instead, you need to develop algorithms that will do some of the work for you!
It's very interesting to me that it appears much of CGI/3d animations appears to just be layering many different texture maps on top until it looks realistic enough.
What tool do people use to create these texture maps/ are they easy to use?
@jifengy Ok, but you also have to ask: how do you generate those textures? One answer is to have an artist sit down and paint every single layer, but this is extremely tedious/time consuming, and doesn't scale to many models, animated textures, etc. So, people (like you!) have to invent algorithms for automatically generating the attributes you want to visualize. For instance, how and where does the sweat drip down the face over time? To answer this question, you might go so far as to solve a partial differential equation (PDE) governing the evolution of a thin film of liquid over the surface, as in this paper.
@pw123 Some people use standard 2D paint programs (like Adobe Photoshop); others use tools that allow you to paint directly on the surface (like ZBrush). Though as mentioned to @jifengy above, it often takes way too much work to paint everything by hand---instead, you need to develop algorithms that will do some of the work for you!