Ways to improve texturing skills
Hello, everyone. I'm looking to improve my texturing skills. Currently I mostly just use photo textures from cgtextures or my own photo collection. I was wondering if anyone has any tips or helpful tutorials to help improve my skills.
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So what I mean by that is for example, look at a piece of metal. Can you break it up with your eyes the diffuse/spec/normal maps? What kind of colors would be on the diffuse? How is the metal reacting to the light and what details are shown from the light? Add that to the specular. Do the colors of highlights change under light? Add color to the specular. How tight or spread is the lighting? Add that to the gloss etc.
Once you have a good understanding of materials, break real life object materials with your eyes, the better your texturing will get.
Check this section out:
http://wiki.polycount.com/TexturingTutorials
The blog itself is more focused on environments in general, but i think the iteration part speaks for all aspects of art, from life drawing to architectural design to textures for games, you get better at doing something the more you do it.
Make a texture, and don't just stop it there, make the same texture a few times to really get a good grasp of that one material type.
My current client actually sent it to me as one of references for the style they were looking for.
@dustinbrown That reference is awesome. I will have to do that.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Oy18_Zb1S8&feature=youtu.be
To start, it's important to know that textures are just as much about providing proper context to a scene as anything. If you want to improve your texturing skills REALLY quickly start working on building some context in to your textures. Our job as environment artists is all about building stories which will lend context to the main story of a game, and it doesn't stop with modeling a scene.
Great pieces of context in a texture should be subtle. Bird Poop, Lichen, Moss, little pebbles which indicate that a texture is a ground texture, as opposed to a wall texture. Things like that go a very long way to making a texture better.
One next step past context is that material separation, and high / medium / low frequency details are incredibly important. Having Large / Medium / Small details in a texture can invite an eye, and lend credibility to the illusion of a setting.
Those tiny details are things that you might not see at first. Take a look at this texture:
Look at how inviting it is to your eye. As you investigate over it, you can see tiny little stories all over it. There is some lichen in the top left, and a little more placed VERY subtly over the rest of the texture, as well as some bird poop and other generic grunge. These are excellent examples of small frequency details.
Now, look again, this time squint your eyes at it to blur what you're seeing. What do you see?
The differences in black / orange / red and brown variations on the texture are great medium frequency details. They invite you to look closer, but more importantly they make the texture believable.
Kick your chair back a few feet and squint your eyes at it again. What do you see? You should see some really nice large color variation and large scale color grouping and patterns, as well as the shape of the bricks - these are great large scale details.
The point of this little exercise is to get you thinking about what our job is as a texture artist. Details without flooding the eye with too much information, and you can just tell that this texture has so much context built in. It's clearly for a castle, or old wall maybe on the side of a modern road and is now covered in that recognizable black soot stains.
Anyhow, there's some more info, but those are some things we always talk about and think about when making textures.