Difference between Procedural and Captured assets?

Question

Can someone please tell me the difference between procedural and captured assets?   Is it that captured materials use texture maps and procedural materials don't? Thank you.

Cyril Dellenbach · Accepted Answer

Scanned materials have parameters for roughness, metalness, height, etc. and you often have two or three values regarding the Base Color.

They are not procedural, but you can make them a bit more unique.

Regards,

Cyril Dellenbach · Answer

Hello @cosmasd86465293,

I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to when mentioning Captured assets, but I guess this is scanned material.

A scanned resource is a material built from images. With one (or several) pictures of a surface, we will build the textures (Base Color, Roughness, etc.) that will define the material. With decent tools, you can quickly get a high quality material. Megascan is a famous example of this workflow, and the entire library come from scans.

A procedural material (as most projects from Designer) is a set of textures made from scratch based on mathematical description (I know how it sounds, but I promise it's not that complicated). Most of the times, this takes time to build, but the procedural aspect allows to edit specificities of the material at any time.

Substance Sampler is a great tool for scanning images, and Substance Designer is, in my opinion, the best tool when it comes to procedural texturing.

That being said, I'm obviously biased considering I'm working on those apps.

Regards,

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