Question for texture artists.

Wozner

Hello PC,

Texturing is my weak place, I have a few questions.

When you shoot texture with your camera, which filters you use or any tricks to make it ready for game engine.

Which texture size you work with, what size for diffuse and which for normal map?

How do you get texture great look, for example I have texture 1024x1024, but I need to change it to 512x512. When I change the size, it is pixelating and looks terrible, how to decrease size but not lose quality?

If you have any useful links or tutorials that have helped you a lot, please share with me. Any help appreciated, by the way I use photoshop.

With all respect
Wozner

Synaesthesia

CGTextures has great advice on this subject. You can cross reference that with Tuts+. I use these techniques quite often and it works well. I do my best to avoid shooting during sunny days as I feel that the ambient light from a cloudy day is far easier to work with in my textures. I'm not a big fan of removing highlights from photos.

I don't use any filters unless I'm shooting glass windows and need to remove reflections, in which case I'll use a circular polarizer. Depending on the shot, a few layered neutral density filters can help get the exposure you want from a shot.

Regarding texture size, it's a highly subjective area. The vehicles I'm creating at work use 2048x textures. Some of the stuff I do at home uses 1024x textures due to repeating tiles. I like to keep my normal map the same size as my diffuse texture. I'm sure there's a best practice somewhere regarding it, but I tend to go with what looks best.

Regarding resizing, if it's pixelated you're probably scaling by nearest neighbor. At work, I generally re-scale using bilinear and a small bit of sharpening depending on how well the downscale went. Some textures require different downscaling modes to look right. It comes down to testing what works for you and your project.

Wozner

Aha! Thanks for the answer, will digg sources that you have provided. Will try to experiment with rescaling.

csprance

I find sometimes it helps also to downscale or upscale by a small amount(10% 20%) until you reach the size you want. This doesn't always apply but it's something to think about.

Also when you resize there is a sampling method you can choose from that says right next to it Best for enlargement or Best for reduction. (Not at the computer so I can't remember the exact method for each type.)

I find also sometimes that running a high pass filter on certain textures help to bring out the detail and cut down on the color variation, which may or may not be what you need depending on the situation.

Racer445 has a decent amount great of texturing tutorials you should check out if you haven't already.