How do you approach creating noise/pattern textures?

Hey everyone, I’m looking to improve my workflow for creating noise and pattern textures for VFX, and I’m curious about how you all approach it.
What goes through your head when you’re designing a noise texture?
How do you decide how it should look to fit the effect you’re aiming for?
+do you mostly generate them procedurally or just hand-paint them?

My workflow consists of generating a pattern from EffectTextureMaker, then taking them into Krita sometimes gimp depending on the effect I’m trying to get but it’s a pretty straightforward process I don’t really think about too much so not much goes into the actual texture it’s mostly done in a shader if I need streaks I use a streak pattern I usually use Voronoi for electricity or sometimes cracks or slash’s remembering the basics of black & white textures is the only thing for more advanced textures for example I use a ghost face then duplicate the layers & position them the way I want them to face depending on the UV setup on the mesh then add some small effects in Krita & Gimp like Gaussian Blur, Distortion, Random Noise etc & the rest is done in a shader.

1 Like

Recently I’ve used Midjourney AI with a “–tile” parameter to generate seamless textures. I needed a bunch of soft, smoky, ethereal effects and after some fiddling with prompts it gave me very good results. I can paint a basic idea by hand in Photoshop and feed it into image-to-image generation for random variations based on general look and description.
I have little to no idea of what I actually need, so trying out various images and seeing various results is part of the exploration process.

Also, as mentioned in comment above, EffectTextureMaker is a fantastic tool for foundational assets - rings, flares, etc.

I suppose when I get more experience with VFX I’ll know what I need and will be able to make the textures myself, fine-tuned for specific needs.

2 Likes