Stand out as a Texture Artist
Charli Holt, Mari Product Manager at Foundry, gives her insights on how to stand out as a texture artist...
Texture Artists are world builders — bringing vital nuance and telling stories through texture.
We're continually creating more educational content on Foundry Learn to help artists learn how to use Mari, but we know that it can seem intimidating. However, learning Mari can broaden your understanding of the texturing process, skill up your workflow, and nail that all-important showreel — even as an experienced user.
Why you need Texture Theory to tell your story
The more you know and understand texture theory, the more you can get from Mari. When starting with Mari, you need to break down imported projects' texture maps into individual Channels (or streams, if you’re a Node Graph user) to use as building blocks for your project. This means that from the very beginning, you can already start to understand how each Channel relates to the look of the final material shader.
Being able to dissect each of your maps and knowing how they'll relate to the final texture is a vital skill for all artists. Why? When reviewing your showreels, studios are looking to see whether you truly understand how each component of your material contributes to the overall texture. They want to see that you know how the imperfections in your microsurface maps distort the reflection of light to not only create a believable asset, but also to capture the story behind that asset.
Sure, that metal gate is rusty, but why is the rust forming in that particular place? Perhaps the gate resides on farmland besides the sea so the salt from the air has started to accelerate the corrosion. Perhaps the farmer always places his hand on a certain point on the gate so the painted coating has started to wear down and dull. Once you start to look into the theory behind physically based textures you can start breaking down how your diffuse, metalness, specular, and microsurface are really contributing to the texture.
I would encourage every aspiring texture artist to spend time studying the fundamentals behind physically based texturing, and learning Mari can be a great way to get a head start on doing just that.
Say no to only using presets
So why is it so difficult to make showreels stand out against tough competition?
We, as artists, are always looking for ways we can improve our efficiency so that we can focus more on creativity and less on clicks. Regardless of which tool you’re using for your projects, it’s very easy to fall into the habit of using pre-made materials for quicker results.
One thing to be mindful of, as a new artist coming into the industry, is that less experienced artists can rely heavily on presets, when instead they should be focusing on honing their texturing skills. Presets can be great for quickly building up projects, but be mindful that VFX studios see many of the same presets used across showreels, to the point where they can name the exact preset you’ve used on your asset with just a glance.
If you’ve seen RustyMetal04 before, I guarantee the CG Supervisor looking at your showreel has seen it before too.
That’s not to say you should avoid using presets altogether — Mari ships with a number of material examples that are a great low-stress starting point for creating your own material projects. Take Gold_Metal, for example. As it is, it’s a physically accurate representation of how gold interacts with lighting. But that’s all it is. It has no specific details or defects that set it in place in a larger world context and that’s why it looks so irregular. You'll never find a clean block of gold with no bump, scratches, fingerprints or smears in the real world. To make it a believable material like this, you’ll need to go in and add these details manually using your final shader and your knowledge of how your maps contribute to it as a guide.
Mari’s material presets are intended to be a foundation for your own creativity so that you never fall into the trap of thinking that one person’s idea of how gold should look fits all scenarios. A preset shouldn't be solely used as a one-size-fits-all solution to your texturing problems.
Know your Blend modes
Blend modes are something we often forget about when working with layers and nodes, though that’s not to say that we don’t use them. I know that as an artist I’ve been guilty of throwing in the odd Overlay layer simply because ‘it made the texture look cool!’. While you’re probably not going to be called out on this from a showreel alone, in a studio environment you want to be as frugal and conservative with your layers as possible.
It's super easy to get lost with adding more and more layers of different Blend modes to get the effect you’re looking for and the reality is that you probably don’t need all of them to get there! Take the time to educate yourself on the mathematical operations that are being used behind the Blend modes and notice the areas where you might be able to replace chains of merge nodes with one single blend mode to get the same result. They're universal for most applications, meaning that you’re instantly improving your value to any studio that wants to cut down projects containing thousands of nodes to just the bare necessities.
Different studios use different applications and approaches to their texturing pipelines so there's no one solution for all. But as Mari encourages you to acknowledge the physical rules behind each texturing choice, it helps you to develop transferable, sought-after skills.
Live and paint by the rule that if you don't know why you're doing something — don't do it. If you do know, well, get ready to explain it in your future interviews.
Want more tips on how to get the best out of Mari? Check out Foundry Learn today.
