Need advice on texturing for older games

Audley

Hello Polycount forums! 

Hi, my name is Audley and I am a texture artist. Kinda. Not an expert by any means but I think I am good enough now to actually call myself a texture artist. I really would like to show you guys some of my work but nearly my entire portfolio got deleted when I took a break from graphic design to deal with life stuff. I am new to the forums and am currently re-building my portfolio; once I have some cool stuff to share I will definitely share it. 

Anyways, I am a texture artist and a modder for Bethesda games. While I have been branching out quite a bit, it's where I started so I still like to work on modding because I find it a lot of fun. However, I have ran into a bit of an issue. I would like to make better and more advanced retextures for pre-existing meshes and I just don't know how to go about doing that. My current technique is to basically just open the pre-made Diffuse map in Photoshop and guess what each object is and then manipulate photos and paste them over the existing UV maps. 

This works alright for large hard-surface objects. But anything with complex UV's or anything that is organic is nearly impossible to texture in Photoshop alone. I am pretty good in Photoshop but that is really the only tool I am competent in. I'd like to do some weapon and clothing retextures but at my current skill level that isn't really achievable. 

I know that modern games with PBR use different texturing techniques. But for older games that don't really use PBR at all I am unsure what the method is. I see people creating these amazing and beautiful retextures for Skyrim and it makes my jaw drop. I try to do similar things but there is only so much you can do with a photo. 

Any and all help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Shogun3d

A lot of older assets can look better by simply re-UV for optimizing, along with rebaking various elements. 

Michael Knubben

3dcoat sounds like it would achieve what you want. I do most of my texturing in there, PBR or stylised, and it's just so much more pleasant to work in 3d. You can also use photo-sources and stamp them onto the mesh, deform them...
But if what you want to do something more than rework existing assets (and work within those limits), you'll want to look at the complete pipeline of a modern game-asset, and learn to model, unwrap etc.

The polycount wiki will help you a lot with everything you need to know, there's a link in my signature.

Sage

For complex uvs you can make an image with different colors to see how the changes affect the final product. This would allow you to know where you are painting. Doing this will let you know what goes where. This is how it used to be done. 3D artist would unwrap object, bake a wire frame, and paint then check 3d model in the 3d app of choice. Reload texture, see results, undo as needed, and continue to do this until the asset is done. Now there are options that make this process easier, but it's more or less the same. You can do a search on you tube if you want to see this in action. There is no magic to it, just hard work and a lot of patience.

FourtyNights

Shogun3d said:

A lot of older assets can look better by simply re-UV for optimizing, along with rebaking various elements. 

Except you dont have a high poly source to bake from when modding, that's the biggest downside. So, it's better to create a new replacement from a scratch. I've never liked the idea of modding anything FROM a pre-made stuff.