I have been studying (and fortunately, now working, yay! haha) as a VFX technical artist. I have survived well until now without knowing much about how to make my own texture, especially to use as masks for my shaders and vfx. But now that I’m fine with some other skills I’m starting to miss a bit this one
So which software should I focus on to learn how to make my own masks? It’s being a bit confusing for me because we have Substance Painter, Designer, Photoshop, and other options that pop up you research about it haha not sure which one to pick. I don’t aim to make super realistic textures, my main goal is to create masks, at least for now =)
And a special thanks to all this community. It’s been amazing support in this VFX Technical Artist journey :)!
Photoshop is probably the main studio standard, and would be the go-to if you were hand painting things like stylized shapes for masks. However if you are doing more abstract stuff, or more general shapes without a strict art style look, Designer is incredibly powerful and fast to iterate and adjust things. You just won’t have precise control over your masks shapes.
With those said, you don’t need Photoshop. Krita is a free painting program that has lots of features and is used by a number of people. For drawing out shapes and hand painting textures, I personally prefer Procreate, and would probably use it exclusively for texture painting if it wasn’t missing a few key filters and options that Photoshop has. You could even use Blender’s grease pencil tool to paint masks too.
