Identifying and Applying Hand-painted Features Onto Procedurally Generated Textures

Abstract: Background. Procedural content generation (PCG) is a powerful tool used in manydifferent areas within game development. One of these areas are texturing where procedural generation have several advantages, including increased effectiveness, reducedstorage cost and unlimited texture resolution. Procedural texturing has long beenused in realistic games and the resulting textures can be indistinguishable from photographs, but when used in stylized games there is still a clear difference in aestheticbetween generated and traditionally painted textures. Objectives. By studying the visual properties of hand-painted stone tile textures,the different characteristic elements could be isolated. These elements can then beimplemented in procedural generation to recreate the iconic look. Methods. 37 different hand-painted textures were analyzed in accordance with aframework for objective art analysis used in art history. The elements identified inthe visual study were recreated in two different procedurally generated textures withthe use of Adobe Substance 3D Designer, a popular software for procedurally generating textures. Lastly a user study was conducted to investigate the impact of thedifferent elements. Results. The implementation resulted in 25 different versions which were rankedin the user study. 24 people in the ages 20-35 participated in the user study, andwhile one of the textures showed clear preference for certain elements over others,this pattern was not reflected in the second texture. Several different reasons for thisis discussed, as well as external factors that might have affected the outcome. Conclusions. The study successfully identified several elements commonly foundin hand-painted textures of stone tiles. However, the user study did not provide aclear answer to the impact of the different elements.