Procedural textures, is it a better way?

Question

Hello, I kinda like proceduralism as much as possible. But is it a good and optimize way to do texturing in game? Or using texture tiles are better? For testing I was fiddling around visual shader and expression today. It seems to be powerful enough for any kind of procedural texture generation. This can be used as a sbsar methodology as well (math to bake).

But not sure if it is an optimized way to do so.

Seeking for some expert opinion in it. Thanks!

Chromyl

Answer 1

@cgvirus said: Hello, I kinda like proceduralism as much as possible. But is it a good and optimize way to do texturing in game? Or using texture tiles are better?

Generally speaking I'd say a mix of the 2. See for an example what they are doing with Substance designer and painter for Star Citizen.

https://substance3d.adobe.com/magazine/star-citizen-texturing-sci-fi-open-world-game-substance/

Mesopotamia

Answer 2

It will depend what you are optimizing for. If it is file size, then procedural will be like 1000x better and smaller than images. If it is quality, then you can get more detail (for example, from noise) and more resolution from procedural than textures, though there are still limits. In terms of speed, I would say premade textures will still be faster. Because the texture rasterization is done in hardware, it is super fast and can handle high res textures and PBR materials and mip mapping interpolation, etc. with no problem. You can do this with procedural too (by baking to a texture) so I guess you can have the best of both worlds, but it is more work. Textures are faster and easier to create, so you optimize for the schedule and budget of your game. But they can be less flexible. It is not that one is better or worse, and it will depend on the aesthetic you are going for.

Rotogravure

Answer 3

Thank you both for nice insights. Probably my target would be braking tile repeats with a single procedural noise mask. Should be more than enough. I like the star citizen approach very much as well. I would definitely test texturelod and particle distribution with color ID. Got lots of ideas. Thanks!

Chromyl