photorealistic textures

Julja

I have a question, how professional artists create their textures without using photos? Because sometimes it's not easy to find suitable photo. What brushes and filters are to use? Are there any ways to create photorealistic textures without using photos? Thanks.

MoP

To create photo-real textures you're pretty much always going to have to use real photos as bases or overlays at some point.
However, you don't need an actual photo of what you want to make, a lot of the time you can just use a photo of a similar sort of thing and just tweak it (mainly just in brightness/hue/contrast/saturation) to make it appear more like the thing you want to represent.
Combine this with some subtle painting (i have a bunch of brushes, some hard, some rough and ragged for different situations), and selection masks with layer effects on them, and you can usually get a fairly photo-real representation of pretty much anything.

Julja

Are there any tutors about it? I'd like to see the examples.

Eric Chadwick

Here's a tut I posted in another thread recently.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=46&t=373024
It's a pretty good overview of some of the steps for painting on and embellishing photo textures.

A lot of it though just comes down to an artist developing a good eye for what works well. A good way to start to develop this skill is to sketch things from the real world. Also painting from life.

Sage

Here are some sites that have tutorials. What you need to do is look at photos as simple shapes if you will and you layer things on top of each other until you get the look you are going for. Also do a search for photo retouching and compositing tutorials since they should give you ideas on how to blend things together using the clone tools of your 2d program.

these sites have some examples of what Mop was talking about

http://lounge.ego-farms.com

http://www.twisted-strand.com/ut_tutorials/text_tut/index.html

Also check out the you suck at photoshop series of videos at youtube since they have some useful tips on how to bled things and they are really funny.

if you feel like paying for some texturing tutorials go

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/

www.eat3d.com very nice tutorial there and cheap.