Photo Source

LaSexorcisto

Hi there!

I'm working on a project at the moment that would really benifit from photosource textures. I was wondering if anyone has any comments or suggestions that could help me in my quest?

What should I watch out for? What are some common problems with photosourcing textures? How many pictures should I take of one wall/texture/subject? Thanks for the help.

MoP

Hmm. Things to watch out for:
Make sure all the photos you're using for your models or maps (levels) fit the same theme and have consistency of contrast/brightness/general lighting.
So you would want to take all your photos under the same lighting conditions, ideally.
Look out for things reflected in your images (such as on shiny metal) and also specular highlights on photos - they may not look right when applied to objects (eg. if the light source direction appears to be wrong for a specular highlight).
Make sure level textures tile well, without obvious repetition of certain details.
If you're photographing a wall, maybe take 2-3 photos at various points along the wall, and try to make them all tile together - that way you can use variations of the same wall texture to break up repetition or monotony.

I've never really done much photosourcing though. There's probably people on this forum with waaay more experience in this matter than I, so you'll have to hope they read this thread!

MoP

Gmanx

As Mop says, if you find a wall you like, take a variety of shots, including ceiling/floor connections and corners.

Here's a few mantra style tips:


Photograph on an overcast day, if you're outside. Direct sunlight is bad, diffuse light is good.

Always take two shots of the same subject, varying any camera settings you're not sure of. Sod's law says one of them is bound to be unusable.

Shoot flat surfaces from as great a distance as possible, with a long lens - on a tripod, especially if they contain any tell tale parallel features.

Try to stay at right angles from your subject, like a normal sticking out from a polygon.

Other than that, it's basic camera use and common sense.

malcolm

Take a few shots as mentioned above, I like to take a shot of the entire surface using the wide angle optical lense, you can use this for your dirt and grime pattern so you get more randomness, then zoom all the way in with the optical lense, then you can take a detal shot of the surface with no telephoto distortion, helpful for tiling surfaces, make sure when you are taking the photos never to use the digital zoom that comes with your camera, all this does is scale the pixels up which makes your images low res. It is the same as scaling textures up in photoshop. I try to take every picture with full optical zoom but I find it just gets too close sometimes, IE when I am standing and shooting straight down for ground textures I have to go to wide angle, but you will get some distortion you can clean up in photoshop.

Badname

When i made some fotos for texture use some time ago I noticed that if I didn't use the flash light indoors, all my pics got blurry and with flash you get horrible reflections so.. or maby its just mee and i need to learn my camera settings :P

And like said above keep some distance

Thank god I live in holland we always got diffuse light with these clouds

FatAssasin

Your photos are blurry when you don't use flash because the lens has to stay open longer and your hand is probably shaking the camera. So use a tripod if you can, or rest the camera on something and use the timer. So try that and see if it helps.

adam

For photosourcing you need to/should spend a few hours collecting as many images as possible. Organize them as you save them (metals, organics, fabrics, etc). No blurry photos, high res only. Check them out and make sure, if need be, that they'll tile nicely or be easy enough to MAKE tilable using the stamp tool or any such things in Photoshop.

If you're taking the shots yourself, shoot on an overcast day. Too bright a day will ruin the opportunity for some good photosourcing fun. Gmanx has this area covered.

Don't rely on the photograph to get you to where you want your texture to be. Only use them for things like overlays, etc... its good practice to actually paint as much as you can.