Any good Texturing tutorials?
Hello,
I am looking for some really good texturing tutorials for game assets/ environments.
I am struggling to make good textures, at the moment I just UV map the object, place textures over the top in Photoshop and then create the normal and spec maps with ShaderMap. I never get amazing results like you see in some artist's portfolios.
Any tutorials on creating good normal, spec and diffuse maps would be awesome. I have found some but none that do the job as well as I would like.
Please post any tutorials/ articles/books/ anything that helped you become a good texture artist.
I am looking for some really good texturing tutorials for game assets/ environments.
I am struggling to make good textures, at the moment I just UV map the object, place textures over the top in Photoshop and then create the normal and spec maps with ShaderMap. I never get amazing results like you see in some artist's portfolios.
Any tutorials on creating good normal, spec and diffuse maps would be awesome. I have found some but none that do the job as well as I would like.
Please post any tutorials/ articles/books/ anything that helped you become a good texture artist.
Replies
But this doesn't answer how - what I suggest to start with is to develop your eye for HOW things work, start pulling apart existing assets and look at how each element of the texture effects the final result. You can either dig them out of the games you've bought and have a look, or you can find some free 3D models online - a good resource for learning is this thread:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=138341
Now, most textures are a combinations of a number of elements:
1. Hand painting - this is what it says on the tin, manually painting with brushes to depict surfaces and texture detail.
2. Photosourcing - taking photographs and manipulating them to work as textures. Some of these manipulations include:
- removal of lighting and shadows - this is particularly important in PBR workflows where you use albedo maps but its good everywhere where you want to light the scene in your own way and not have the existing shadows clash.
- fixing distortion - a straight up photograph wont work, you will likely need to straighten it up, fix perspective etc.
- isolating important parts and removing parts that detract from the image - for example: getting rid of unique elements to better allow for tiling or to reduce how repetitive it looks.
3. Generating them from high detail modelling/sculpting - we generate a number of kinds of texture map directly from a high poly model, we also use some of these across multiple kinds of map these include: ambient occlusion, curvature, normal map.
generally, we will use all three to create a final result, but you will usually lean further toward hand painting or photo sourcing rather than equally the two unless its a strange stylisation like Team Fortress which balances painterly strokes with photographic bases.
Ultimately you need to get good at identifying what things result in what effects in the final image. You can ask for tutorials but the best thing you can do is pick up the demo of marmoset, read their guides and start making textures for a cube. Start with things like just scribbling various values of grey onto a roughness map and seeing how they change the surface. little experiments like these before moving up to full on texturing.