Where do you get textures?
vertex
First, if this is the wrong board sorry it just seemed like it would be the right one. But this is just a simple question or two since i'm still learning and man do i have a lot to learn. I'm wondering where do people usually get textures for 3D models that are free to use? Or for most of the time are they hand made by the artist? I'm asking in part because at the moment im trying to make a few pieces and wondering how to get some textures since i don't know how well of a texture i could make myself. Thanks for any replies!
Replies
A resource for phototextures is cgtextures
OK that's what i was thinking, and may i ask what is the best program to use? I'm assuming photoshop or is there an alternative since photoshop now has the annoying creative cloud?
Photoshop has been the standard for texturing for years and years. Recently there are new applications that allow you to paint in 3D such as MARI and Substance Painter. For a start, you can't go wrong with Photoshop. It can teach you all you need to know about texturing and take your project to completion.
CG Texture is a great source because you don;'t need to worry about copyright. Yes that's a big thing once you become profession - copyright. 1 reason we try not to grab pictures from Google image for texture.
There are also various groups that share photo for every one to use freely in their projects such as this Flickr Matte Painting resource group. Excellent resource.
Basically everyone should know their way around photoshop when working in a creative field, as it's pretty damned standard for anything 2D (textures/graphics/web banners/stills/photos/gifs/etc etc.)
Like DireWolf mentioned, there are also other texturing tools that are sometimes used in conjunction with photoshop or by themselves. I haven't tried MARI so I can't say anything about it, but other types of 3D texturing programs include Mudbox, Zbrush (polypainting, or for making highpoly models that you can bake from to use as a base when creating textures), 3D-Coat, etc. Then you have other programs that are geared more towards looking like traditional painting like Corel Painter.
Personally I've been loving Substance Painter recently due to the whole being able to paint across multiple types of bitmaps used in a PBR setup at once. (metal, roughness, color, etc.)
On top of that there are also programs like Substance Designer, where you're creating node-based textures, and the Quixel Suite which is basically a large plugin extension for photoshop.
I wouldn't worry about all of those programs right now if you're just starting out though, it seems that a lot of texturing software depends on people's tastes and what feels right for them. I'd focus on learning photoshop first if you haven't already.
Some people also go out with their cameras and shoot their own texture references from real-life to basically build themselves a library that they can grab pieces from. It might be nice to try if you have a lot of free time, as it'll provide plenty of practice in how to translate a digital photograph into a useable/tileable/shadows taken out/color corrected/skews fixed/etc. texture.
There's also people who have special cameras that I guess capture a lot of information about things like roughness values and physically-accurate colors and the like, but I have no freaking clue about how they go about that.
And it's not so easy usually.
One company I worked for restricted Internet access for employees at all and only allowed to use its own library.
I mostly photograph things myself. You actually need not so huge library.
As of getting special values for roughness and others it's way exaggerated . You would do no worse just by guess + real time tweaking.
Perhaps only things is necessary is a color calibration target to make a few camera profiles for a few typical lighting conditions.
As of software there is no software on the market that could cover all texturing tasks. All have its own annoying limitations.
But Photoshop did a huge improvement last year letting you do tricks that was only available in node based editors like Fusion before.
And although it's slow with 16 and 32 bit textures and not allows you to paint multichannel at once it still covers texturing task wider than anything else.
I use Zbrush,Photoshop and Filter forge plugin . Prefer Filter forge over Substance Designer
[ame]
Thanks for that! I'll definitely check it out, though are those lessons free? I see that that one is, but i know that futurepoly has lessons that you do have to pay for. Thanks again!
Oh OK sweet, thank you! And as a side question since i'm new here, which board do you think would be most suitable to ask about online courses?