Using Textures made by yourself or from websites

kevingamerartist

Hi all,
I'm an aspiring to become an Environment Artist, but currently aiming to become a Junior Environment Artist at the moment.

I have a question about using textures in video games. For textures I know you can download them online from websites that allow you to use them in your portfolio work, and I have also heard that some people create their own textures.

In the video game industry I was wondering when you are working at a studio if you are allowed to use textures from a website that allows people to use them in projects, or when you work at a studio if you have to be able to create your own textures? I don't know if it's just a recommendation or a requirement to be able to create your own textures, or if you can you use textures from another website, or if it just depends from studio to studio. Unless there is someone specifically who works on textures at a studio like a Texture Artist, but I don't know.

Any feedback on this is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

luthyn

Depends on alot . Are you looking to make realistic or stylized textures?

Being able to paint/create your own textures is great, I encourage you to practice that. But using photos as a base is also ok. In the past you would normally just head over to CGTextures and grab some base reference from there.

http://www.cgtextures.com/

Now with PBR being a thing, I find that to be a bit iffy. Alot of stuff from CGTextures wasnt made with PBR in mind. Theres alot of lighting information still baked in and what not.

On that same note, Quixel is about to launch the closed beta of Megascans which is made with PBR in mind. Once that ball gets rolling then you will have another place to look for material.

http://www.quixel.se/dev/megascans

Again, it depends what studio you are at and if they have a license for these tools.

Have a look at some of the PBR tutorials here:http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn

He goes over the basic ideas of PBR and also how to convert and old style material into a PBR material.

You can also look here:

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNgs2DcAsF4[/ame]

and see how he approaches using sculpting and a mix of different texture techniques to get cool results.

And, because I never like to not mention it, there is also Substance Designer! With Substance Designer you can either make your texture from scratch with no bitmap input (my preferred method) or you can bring in some zbrush sculpts or bakes and work off of that. Here is one of many examples out there showing what you can do:

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71V6Vi6OpbM[/ame]

I hope some of that was semi helpful.

gnoop

I work as environment artist for quite a while. And through the years some companies didn't care where you pick your resources at all. Others restricted Internet access for artists and had no-flash policy. Some hire a special person who collect resources and checks its legal status.

Once I started to work as independent contractor I just have a point in my contracts usually which requires to provide a separate sub-contract with any 3d person whose work I could use. That makes things pretty hard.

So I have to use only my own photos or photos provided by my customer.

slosh

If you start using programs like substance and ddo, you will probably become a lot less dependent on images. A lot of studios also buy accounts with texture sites so it is legal when they use the images straight in their games. Depends on the situation but using images if fine but I would get in the habit of altering them to make them more for yourself.

gnoop

In my experience studios buy accounts/content from well-known providers, expensive ones. With more or less clear and acceptable EULA from their legal departments point of view. Unfortunately those providers have rarely something good for an environment art beyond a few trees cutouts with a kind of clunky alpha channel. And never from sites like cgtextures.


As of procedural textures I would also suggest to look at Filter Forge. Imo it's more suited for tileable environment textures. Nevertheless I believe a good photo is still what makes your work truly competitive, PBR or not.