Serious question. How do you make textures, how do they work and how do you apply them?

Rockatansky

To be clear, I'm an aspiring 3D artist and I have yet to try making some stuff on my own. I know bits and pieces about the process behind the creation of characters and scenes and stuff, but there's one part of it that I still don't understand. The Texturing. The thing is, I can't look up and watch an online course because 1: Most of them are pay-wall'd and 2: I have no way of paying for it, so what's left are some crappy, not up-to-date tutorials. Anyway, I would love if anyone of you in the community, especially the pros that work for the top-notch videogame/movie companies, could give me some in-depth insight on how you work with textures. I'm not asking for a tutorial, just explanation. Thx in advance

Ged

Hi! Thats unfortunately a very complicated question because it depends on so many factors. What type of game are you making? whats the art direction of that game? what type of device are you aiming for eg mobile or ps4? what shader will be applied to the model etc etc. These all impact on the method for making the texture.

 So my advice would be to have a go at something and let people here critique your work, old tutorials would still be helpful for you to watch - theres no quick way to learn this stuff. Everyone starts off  in game art not knowing what works best and how to make something really look good, that just comes with years and years of experience and hard work learning and pushing ourselves.

Making textures in photoshop or substance designer or painter or quixel suite or any other tool all require a good artistic eye for detail and form and style. There's no perfect way to make textures that game artists all follow, different studios use different software but I suppose its good form to learn how to use substance painter or quixel as those are becoming more common these days.

Im not claiming to be super pro or anything but Ive worked on video games for about 7 years so Ive done my best to answer you anyway.

almighty_gir

I'll answer question 2 from the title: "How do they work?"

Textures are simply put, an array of vectors. a vector being (in this case) a method of storing four float values. The values stored per vector are x,y,z,w or, r,g,b,a. The number of vectors is equal to the width multiplied by the height of the texture, in pixels. These relate to your model, by way of mesh UV's, or UVW coordinates. If you imagine that a vertex has an x,y,z coordinate in 3 dimensional space, then UV's are the coordinates of that same vertex in 2 dimensional space. U = X, V = Y. A 'fragment' or pixel shader will assign the texture to the mesh based on these vertex coordinates in their relative spaces.

Textures don't just have to be used as a way of conveying material data on a model either. You can use them for a lot of mathematical processes too, usually in the form of "look up textures" or "LUT's". If you consider that each pixel in a texture can store 4 float values between 0 and 1, then you can potentially store a ton of data in a relatively small texture.

Rockatansky

Ged said:

Hi! Thats unfortunately a very complicated question because it depends on so many factors. What type of game are you making? whats the art direction of that game? what type of device are you aiming for eg mobile or ps4? what shader will be applied to the model etc etc. These all impact on the method for making the texture.

 So my advice would be to have a go at something and let people here critique your work, old tutorials would still be helpful for you to watch - theres no quick way to learn this stuff. Everyone starts off  in game art not knowing what works best and how to make something really look good, that just comes with years and years of experience and hard work learning and pushing ourselves.

Making textures in photoshop or substance designer or painter or quixel suite or any other tool all require a good artistic eye for detail and form and style. There's no perfect way to make textures that game artists all follow, different studios use different software but I suppose its good form to learn how to use substance painter or quixel as those are becoming more common these days.

Im not claiming to be super pro or anything but Ive worked on video games for about 7 years so Ive done my best to answer you anyway.

Actually, it's not a game. It's something I'm doing for a career-defining school project coming up. It's a Cyberpunk thing with two characters, a model (gun or something) and a scene all put together. Everything done by myself. I want to make it realistic, like Uncharted or Death Stranding, but extremely amateur and not so demanding. The only thing that irks me is how I'm going to texture the body and face of those characters, hence this question.

Jakob Gavelli

Is this a project which scope you set yourself or did you school set it for you?

I'm going to be completely frank and say that that amount of work, at the quality you're describing, isn't doable for a single artist. Not even the most seasoned professionals often hade the reach to work on both Characters - Props and Environments at the quality you're talking.
Death Stranding and Uncharted have big teams of extremely experienced professionals. For someone who is asking the question "how do you make textures" this isn't feasible as a project.

I'd consider doing something smaller, like a single model to start out.  
Or start with the small model and then when you understand the workflow and when you've re-done that model until you're at the quality you want, you can move on to something else, but probably have a better understanding of the workload and why the huge scale of the project isn't really going to be doable. 

I'm just kind of assuming that you're not very experienced with game art, and everyone dreams big and have huge ideas when they start out, it's very common ^^

Rockatansky

Jakob Gavelli said:

Is this a project which scope you set yourself or did you school set it for you?

I'm going to be completely frank and say that that amount of work, at the quality you're describing, isn't doable for a single artist. Not even the most seasoned professionals often hade the reach to work on both Characters - Props and Environments at the quality you're talking.
Death Stranding and Uncharted have big teams of extremely experienced professionals. For someone who is asking the question "how do you make textures" this isn't feasible as a project.

I'd consider doing something smaller, like a single model to start out.  
Or start with the small model and then when you understand the workflow and when you've re-done that model until you're at the quality you want, you can move on to something else, but probably have a better understanding of the workload and why the huge scale of the project isn't really going to be doable. 

I'm just kind of assuming that you're not very experienced with game art, and everyone dreams big and have huge ideas when they start out, it's very common ^^

You're right. The only reason I wanted to go that far is because I don't know how competitive the 3D art work environment is in my country, so I decided to make a safe bet.

RN

This article "Survey of Texture Mapping" has a fundamental definition of what texture mapping is and what its main uses are.
The wiki goes through that as well, but in the context of game art: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texturing

If you don't have enough cash to go through a full course then consider getting gumroad tutorials. They're generally cheaper but still valuable since they come from people that work in the industry (but they're not a replacement for years and years of study obviously).
- http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Gumroad_Tutorial_List#Painting
- http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Gumroad_Tutorial_List#Materials.2FTexturing

Ged

yeah 2 finished characters close to uncharted 4s quality would probably take a very experienced character artist at least about 6 months. Especially if they are animated. Personally I recommend a beginnner to focus on making the gun and maybe a scene for the gun to be in, cyberpunk is a good theme. if you want to make very realistic assets then you will probably want to follow a workflow something like this.

1. model the high poly fully detailed model of the gun
2. make a low polygon model of the gun
3. uv map the low polygon model
4. bake the high poly to the low poly model
5. texture using pbr materials so substance painter or quixel are your easiest choice
6. present your work nicely in a good 3d game engine or renderer eg unreal engine 4 or marmoset toolbag 3

The dream of making 2 really polished high quality characters is a good one, dont give up, just learn to walk before you start running.