Automated Texture Tiling with the Unity ArtEngine
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- Опубліковано 22 лют 2021
- #photogrammetry #artengine #unity #seamremoval #ai #materials #textures #tutorial #workflow
In this video I present a semi-automated seam removal process with the Unity Artengine.
As a subject I picked a pretty tricky to tile, painted brick wall.
I believe that if the ArtEngine can tile such irregular surface with lack of clear color distiction between elements, it can tile probably everything.
I hope someone finds this video useful and informative
If you like it and want to see even more content like this one, please subscribe to my channel and leave the thumbs up.
Big thanks who did it already as it really helps me to move forward with my channel.
Cheers!
Grzegorz Baran
Excellent video, very clear with good informative narration. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you Barnyz, appreciated
nice review as usual
Thank you
Another great tutorial! thanks for sharing. The only problem is that ArtEngine is not available to everyone to test and the price is prohibited for small companies or freelancers.
Hey Dimitrios, thanks a lot. As far as I know it is available for testing but to get a 1 month trial you need to contact them directly. Unfortunatelly there is no a 'trial' version to download as I see. I totally agree regarding the price and this is why I mentioned on this video that there are cheaper solutions and expensive to pick. But as I also mentioned on the video, if I have 100+ high quality scans to process I would really consider getting the license for one month and get them all done. I can clearly see that the price is getting down, it used to be way more (5 times?) expensive before the Unity acquisition of the Artomatix so they are heading into the right direction. This is a really good piece of software and competition for the Substance products which is always welcomed as keeps everyone moving forward :). The mutation node I mentioned that I might cover in my future videos if anyone is interested is a realy mindblowing feature with tone of functionality.
So I totally agree.. its still way to expensive for small companies and this is the biggest con. This is why I still use Substance products as I have perpetual license for all what makes me more independent.. but the ArtEngine is definitelly a tool to consider and an reliable option in any material related photogrammetry workflow and my intention was to show what actually it can deliver :D
Big thanks for watching
@@GrzegorzBaranArt I contacted them before they get bought from Unity for a trial and when I told them I'm a freelancer (1 person only in my company) they never even bother to reply back to me. But things changed a lot when it was bought from Unity.. But does the ArtEngine with 95 USD / month do the job? Because the Studio version is 333 USD / month and minimum 5 seats! That's a whooping 1665 USD / month... Plus after your trial expires you have a commitment for a year...
@@dvogiatzis I have no clue, I would simply contact them and ask. I have noticed that after being acquired they have much better and more responsive customer support. What has happened before the acquisition to you makes sense as they realised you wont be able to pay their price anyway.. as I mentioned it was way more expensive to what it is now. Btw. please drop their answer if you decide to contact them.. as I am really same curious about licensing related things and actual price. I am surprised that you have to make any commitment after the trial is over as I didnt have to do any.
@@GrzegorzBaranArt I downloaded the normal version (not the studio) which is 95 USD / month. The one year commitment I think starts when you get on with the normal subscription payments. But I think there should be an indie license which would be good for small time developers. There is a market like this in Unity and Unreal Engine (the main competitor of Unity) has bought Quixel. So I think it makes sense Unity to provide ArtEngine...
@@dvogiatzis so its 19 per month now :) .. yay!! Looks like someone there listen to users
Really good introduction to the ArtEngine Grzegorz!
The seam removal is indeed really powerful, but the software is unfortunately way too overprice at the moment. Sure it has the best seam removal on the market and some other tools are great like the mutation tool, but overall, functionality wise it's still quite poor and it's just too expensive for freelancer and independent artist. I know they are planning on releasing an indie license, let's hope it will be at an interesting price :)
I totally agree. Its way too expensive to what it can offer. This is probably one of the main reasons why I still use Substance products as a core of my photogrammetry workflow and I made a video about the ArtEngine just to showcase its capabilities to those who havent seen it in action yet. As I also mentioned on the video, if I would have 100+ high quality scans to process I would really consider getting the license for one month or something like that to get them all done and deactivate the license after. Anyway, the price dropped about 5 times after the Artomatix was acquired by the Unity.. its the biggest downside of the ArtEngine since always.. I really hope it is going to get an Indie license option soon. Cheers!
Your videos on photogrammetry are super educational ! I used to have a trial version of Unity ArtEngine and i absolutely loved it ! But now its discontinued. I Really hate using photoshop/substance painter to manually stamp a texture to make it seamless. The results aren't great sometimes and its much slower. Especially on patterns like bricks where you have to keep the shapes intact when tiling.
Have you been using any alternative tools to get rid of texture seams for your scans ? Thanks in advance.
Thanks! Yes, I did. Was planning to make a video about that at some point. Nothing really beats ArtEngine to be honest, but with proper LOW POLY approach manual tiling isnt that bad.
@@GrzegorzBaranArt ah i was hoping not to hear that. True though, Artengine was absolutely amazing ! they are integrrating its features elsewhere (probably in unity itself) but who knows... I'd love to see a video of your current workflow, especially with materials made out of certain shapes like bricks. Ground textures like sand are much easier to tile.
Hi Grzegorz, thanks for making another useful and very informative video.
Do you have any chance to try the newest version of Alchemist (2020.3.2). I saw they have a new node "Image to Material with AI Powered". Also most of the cons you mentioned before like the Delighting has no adjustment has been updated.
One more thing is since Reality Capture has changed their pricing plans to a more reasonable price, do you have any plan to do the quality comparison between all photogrammetry software ?
I'm owning the photogrammetry pipeline for our studio since 2 years, mostly work with Reality Capture so in case you need any support I could help, just to encourage you to do more useful videos like this one.
Cheers !
Hey, sure. I already did that in my previous video :)
ua-cam.com/video/XDAUw_dSmt8/v-deo.html
and compared the result to the photogrammetry made material
Regarding the Reality Capture and photogrammetry software comparison video: yes, I do have plans to make a comprehensive comparison but it takes time. Initially was waiting for 1.7 update from Agisoft Metashape as it was a big update ... same as for the quite meaningful update from 3DF Zephyr. Currently I work on the content for the video and researching it. Still might take me a few months as I have a few more videos in queue but all are connected to some degree. Unfortunately the recent acquisition affected my plans a bit.
Great work! I wish this tool was affordable, too bad
Thanks William, regarding the price it is definitelly heading into the right direction so I believe its just a matter of time when it is affordable for indie users and students :)
Grzegorz, do you happen to know a workflow to use multiple texture maps in Substance/art enigne? For example. If I am scanning an extremely large area, 8192x8192 is just not large enough, so I want to use UDIMs instead to keep the res of a 20k texture in 4 8192s? Would really love a tutorial on this.
Hey Sergey, unfortunately I can't help you as I didnt use more then just a single UDIM space. Of course you can generate many textures in Metashape and Substance Designer baker supports many UDIMs but since I didnt use this feature I dont know the workflow. I usually generate 16k texture and for my needs it is more then enough, especially that for generation you can change the uvunwraping mode in Metashape which depending on the surface type can provide better space usage within available uv space.
Daje lajka w ciemno :) Kiey jakiś tutorial / przegląd aplikacji do "stereoscopic photogrammetry" ? :)
Dzieki wielkie, szacuje wstepnie ze prawdodpobnie po dwoch kolejnych materialach video (photogrammetry equipment for small and medium prop capture i material niespodzianka zwiazana z poprzednim ;).. nie wiem jeszcze w jakiej kolejnosci bo material o prop scanning czeka na dwie rzeczy (bezprzewodowy trigger i filtr polaryzacyjny) i jak na razie szacowany czas dostawy to kwiecien) i jesli oczywiscie nie wyskoczy mi nic ciekawszego w miedzyczasie :)
@@GrzegorzBaranArt a możesz rzucić jakimiś przykładami? Wiem, że jest coś takiego jak "Dabarti Capture", który pozwala robić bardzo dokładne normal mapy. No i Substance Designer, z ktorego korzystam, ale w sumie nie jestem jakoś specjalnie zadowolony z rezultatów...
@@dainjah Rozumiem ze pytasz o photometrc stereo a nie stereoscopic photogrammetry. Jak najbardziej jest kilka aplikacji do photometric stereo. Pracuje nad tutorialem o tej technica od ponad roku ;) ale zrobilem sobie przerwe bo zbyt wiele rzeczy sie zmienilo w ramach researchu. Odnosnie aplikacji ktore testowalem do tutoriala o photometric stereo i ktore zamierzam w przyszlosci zaprezentowac to Subtance Designer, ArtEngine, Dabarti Capture i DetailsCapture.
The price tag for this software is outrageous relevant to it's current functionality and feature set - I'm not sure that's even arguable.
I totally agree. The price seems to be the wall everyone bounces from and I really hope the more people vocalise that, the sooner Unity is going to do something with this. It was the main blocker since the beginning. They reduced the price 5 times already, I guess a few more time is needed. This is why the main tool I use for tiling is still the Substance Painter. I purchased it on a Steam so I have a perpetual license which isnt subscribtion dependent and I can just keep using it 'forever'. But I covered the ArtEngine as its really good to know what tool are out there and what they offer. While ago tiling a stuctural surface like this one was impossible with any automated solution.. now it is, and this is something what inspired me to make this video. If the price is lower, ArtEngine might be the best available solution for seam removal on the market and no brainder for everyone. With the current price tag it isnt yet. Cheers!
@@GrzegorzBaranArt I really appreciate the video, particularly showing how ArtEngine would be used to tackle a difficult pattern, as opposed to rocks, gravel, etc., as you say. The AI mutation algorithms are obviously very impressive, but lack durability in their current form - the algorithms need to address more complex surfaces with greater ease to justify the current price, among other things.
HI, I did the same node operation on the brick wall image, but produced the result of complete coverage.Do you know why?It starts at 8:44 of the video
I am not sure what do you mean. Mask by default is considered black, so everything transparent while painting is going to be considered as black. Maybe you set very big brush size so you pain everything in white (the size can be change by +/- on keyboard or from the top menu)?
Hello, Grzegorz, I wonder if you have ever encountered such a problem. Take a lot of pictures. After color correction, the scanned texture collage will be highlighted, forming a highlight bar. I don’t know how to deal with this. Suggest? Thank you. i.imgur.com/n2DQzHf.png
I am not sure what do you mean. Do you mean lack of color cross surface consistency due to light changes during the capture? There are a few different factors which can cause that. THese can be light changes during the capture, solution for this one is to improve the capture part and get controll over the light.. so use an umbrella, tent or lightreflector to cast a shadow. If it wac captured in cloudy day and lighting change was caused by the moving clouds I would suggest to use automated setting in a camera so it addopts to light changes to fill entire dynamic range available with the data. Or .. use your own source of light which overwrites the external lighting.. going to cover it soon in my future videos.
I guess you already captured these images and you cant repeat the capture process. To fix that you can use algorithms offered by postprocessing software. I described it in my ebook. Basically something like Autotone in Lightroom etc.
Last but not least.. lets say you have the final texture with stripes .. you can always bring consistency using dedicated nodes. I suggest color equiliser node in Substance Designer. Corol equaliser in Alchemist would do the same. ArtEngine offers similar tool which is called a GRADIENT REMOVAL which I presented in this video.. but as you can see this one isnt very good and reliable.
Hope that helps :), Cheers!
@@GrzegorzBaranArt Thank you for your reply
have you heard about substance alchemyst?
Sure I did. I covered it in my few previous videos already with a bit more focus on tiling on this one:
ua-cam.com/video/XDAUw_dSmt8/v-deo.html
The tiling algorithms the Substance Alchemist offers are way behind what the ArtEngine offers. And quality wise there is a huge gap between results from the Alchemist and ArtEngine. Currently as far as I know there is no AI involved in Alchemist tiling solution and even if the tool is getting better with every new update.. its still not very reliable option in my opinion for tiling as when process sacrifices some quality. Dont get me wrong.. Alchemist is a very cool tool and does the job, but at this stage I would prefer to tile the scan which I invested a day of my work already to bring it to the top quality level... manually using the Substance Painter then let Alchemist do this for me. I wouldnt mind tho to let ArtEngine to do this for me. Hope it makes sense :D
1:35 I still don't understand why this should be done.
Do you mean why do I need to tile textures? If yes, all generic textures need to tile so they can be applied to the geometry which covers more then a size of the texture. So lets say you have a ground surface in a game which covers 100m by 100m. If you apply a texture of grass which covers 2x2meters, which was tiled you will see a 100x100m surface covered with grass. But if the texture wasnt tiled and has edge seams .. you will see repetitive patches after the texture is applied to this surface. So the texture has to repeat itself in each direction. On this video you can see it while I animate it on the ball and plane behind. Its a square texture but because it is tiled (has removed seams), you cant see laser cut when it repeats itself but the repetition is seamless.
@@GrzegorzBaranArt Oh, thats how it work. Thx!