end result is all that matters. i wouldnt use photo sourcing to emulate a hand painted aesthetic; i wouldn't use hand painting to emulate a photographic aesthetic. you could spend all day trying to copy a photograph by hand for the prestige of being a hand-painter, but you're making about as much sense as a photosourcer…
Well, if you see a model and you can spot the image that was pasted on it and left as is for the texture, that is a bad thing. Especially if the photo source has lighting etc that sticks out. Worse yet is when you can tell it had a very poorly done crazybump pass to create the normals, double yuck. Using photos as source…
Crysis 2 and Skyrim disagrees with you. As well as Witcher 2, Guild Wars 2, TERA Online, Assassin's Creed 3. Just to mention games I played recently. All of them have heavly photosourced textures. It will never be noticeable for average player. The point is that hand-painting texture do not always fit into aesthetics and…
I noticed that photosourcing is more common for older engines , that do not have many of the more modern advanced features like ambient occlusion , shadows etc ... then photosourcing can add a lot more realism as long as is not just a copy and paste work ..... I also noticed that photosourcing is massively used in terrain…