Use of Photos in Game art texturing.

Hayden Zammit

I'm not the best at textures, and I had a few questions.

I know if the style is hand-painted then obviously you paint them from scratch, but with the stuff thatss more realistic do you guys use photos much?

I've seen Cgtextures and sites like that. Do pros actually use them? Like might they just use a dirt or ground texture or something like that for a little added detail?

any info is appreciated. Was just wondering how much its used and in what way.


cheers

warby

very much depends on the art direction fo you title but:

yeah tons fo games use photos in their textures but alot of photoshop work goes into them anyway !

look at the games from remedy for example max payne1+2/alan wake practicaly everything in those games is photo textured !

fearian

An important thing to take away is that most photo-sourced textures are a mix of a few photos done cleverly in photoshop. There is often a small bit of painting and shopping involved to touch up areas or add details - There's no one way to go about it!

Hayden Zammit

Yeah, I had a feeling that a lot of pros use them. I mean, some of the stuff you see just looks like they'd have to be using photos.

.morph3us

you cant use those textures without touching them, thats for sure.
there is always some tweaking involved to get the right feeling, but using photographs for textures is commonly used.

go and check nDo, which is a free photoshop plugin that enables you to convert photos into normal maps, so you dont have to sculpt them...

Hayden Zammit

Yeah, I checked out nDojust before. It's pretty snazzy.

haiddasalami

There's a tonne of editing that goes into them. Removing shadows, painting over, levels adjustment etc etc. Some people also paint over pictures as a base for hand painted textures. So yeah there's definitely people that use them.

Vrav

The most I use photos for is adding randomized detail, similarly to how one might use fractal or filtered noise effects in blending. Photos are often better to use for that because they're more organic, if you put some effort into it so that they aren't too recognizable.

Noticeably photosourced artwork is usually pretty ugly.