Question regarding handpainted tileable textures (please help!)

raucastillo

Hi everyone! My name is Rau Castillo, II'm a beginner artist and this is my first time posting on this forum. I would really appreciate if any of you could help me with a question I have.

I'm currently working on a handpainted tileable bark texture. Once I got to the point where I am now, I started looking at other similar bark textures for reference on shadows and lighting and I noticed that a lot of them look like they are more "zoomed in" than mine, and show a smaller area of the tree (I hope that makes sense. I don't really know how to explain it)

Here is my WIP texture and one example of what I talked about to make it more clear:

Mine:

Texture found on the internet:

My question is: 

Does it come down to personal preference how "zoomed in" a texture is, or are there any set of "rules" on how tileable textures need to be?
I'm doing this texture as a portfolio piece and not for any specific project, so I don't have any requirements that I need to follow. However, I still want to make a texture as if it were to be used in a real game.

I'm still on the very early stages so now would be a good time to change anything, before I move on.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! 

Thank you very much in advance,

Rau

Obscura

Using larger area helps hiding the repeating a bit, but basically its up to you or what looks good.

Noth

Yeah, it helps to hide tiling but it's also more work to paint. A suggestion would be to paint a nice modest size texture and then duplicate it 3 times to take your 512 texture to a 1024. Then you modify those enough to be unique and then you've saved yourself a bunch of time. 

I also suggest you try working in 3DCoat / Photoshop. It's a great combo for handpainted anything. Below is the tiling texture setup in 3DC, you can send that back to PS easily to work on it, and then back to 3DC to check / fix.



Best of luck!

raucastillo

@Obscura and @Noth thank you very much for your help! and @Noth thank you also very much for taking the time to illustrate your answer!  

Eric Chadwick

My suggestion, put it on a real mesh. Do this early, so you get a sense of how much you can tile it, and how big your details need to be.

Bark goes on a tree or a log, which are mostly cylindrical. The texture can be more zoomed in as you're seeing less tiling.

A dirt or rock texture is typically over a larger mesh. You see more tiling, so the details should be smaller and less repetitious.