Photosourcing vs Digital Painting

Raymond Arnold

As someone who is trying to build a portfolio of environmental art, what is the recommendation of how much to rely on photosourced material? I know that good textures usually need you to heavily modify the base photos to actually look good, but it still kinda feels like cheating. If you were hiring an entry level environmental artist, how much would you care about how they got their textures done?

Joao Sapiro

if it looks good, it looks good.

ericdigital

It's all about the style. I'd say practice both so you can adapt to a wider range of production demands.

EarthQuake

Photos, filters, painting, these are all things you need to know how to use competently to create textures, there is no secret balance to them. The hard part is understanding material properties, understanding how to define a material through spec, gloss, color, etc. When you can recreate a material, the method you use means very little, only the end result.

Now as far as photosourcing being cheating, that is just silly. If you had to make a texture of a concrete wall, you wouldn't paint every pixel by hand would you? That would be extremely slow and give you worse results than simply finding a good source to use. Often times that is the case, where starting with a photo base not only will save time but improve your work over simply hand painting everything. The trick to using photos is knowing how to edit, blend/mask them, and most importantly choosing GOOD source to start from in the first place.

Now, if you're working on a hand-painted stylized game its a bit of a different story, but even here you can use photos as a base to paint over to save time.

At the end of the day, if it improves your work, or makes your work easier, DO IT! Efficiency is one of if not the single most important aspect of working as a professional artist, about the only thing that is actually "cheating" is stealing other people's work.

renderhjs

Johny wrote: »

if it looks good, it looks good.

what he says, make that your first thinking priority.

Every good CG artist I know (painting, 3d,..) relies strongly on photo sources and its an accepted technique as long as it looks very good. If you make it look crap and obvious that it is traced or based on a photo then you fail and deserve to be called a cheater and or all the other things. But if you succeed with something great, then seriously who the f*** cares?