My Hand-made Textures (Updated often)

[pappou]

I can see your attention to detail, Jamey. Your work is showing better and better regimen.
It is good for people to be aware how well you are handling these little nit-picky things that need so much looking after.

One trick in lighting, which you probably already know: Use a min. of two lights, one left one right, and if possible with controlled kelvin. [Four lights, of course, covers better].
Then aim the left side to the far right, and right one to the far left: Let their beams intersect over the center of the target. Then adjust a bit to remove any hot or dark spots. The hot spots are difficult to see -- until they come up in the photos.

[Jamey]

I took some time outside to enjoy the weather, and ended up finding a whole bunch of good textures, these are my first flowers and grass textures :












I'm also going to try to find a way to blend the flowers and grass together in photoshop, you guys think I should give it a shot?

[Jamey]

and here is the photoshoped version of the flowers, which I like better

[pappou]

Very nice, Jamey. You are a whiz at making textures. Do you have a journal yet, where you can collect your textures into a single group? I think a separate Texture Journal would be good to have.

What did you do in the PhotoShop flowers, versus the first one? [I can see that you filled in the hole, bottom left.]

But i don't see what you mean by mixing the flowers and the grass? Can you explain? Maybe a small sample?

[Jamey]

Very nice, Jamey. You are a whiz at making textures. Do you have a journal yet, where you can collect your textures into a single group? I think a separate Texture Journal would be good to have.

What did you do in the PhotoShop flowers, versus the first one? [I can see that you filled in the hole, bottom left.]

But i don't see what you mean by mixing the flowers and the grass? Can you explain? Maybe a small sample?

Do you have a journal yet, where you can collect your textures into a single group? - Umm, well I do have a folder on my computer with all my textures in it, but no journals at the moment

What did you do in the PhotoShop flowers, versus the first one? [I can see that you filled in the hole, bottom left.] - I basicly used the healing brush to fill in the spots where there were no flowers, so that flowers covered the whole texture

But i don't see what you mean by mixing the flowers and the grass? Can you explain? Maybe a small sample? - I think I can try to mix the flowers in with the grass texture, so the grass will look like it has little flowers here & there. I'll be using the cloning tool a lot for that process, and I will post a sample when I feel it is ready

[Jamey]

ok, what do you all think? I sort of tried to make it look more realistic by blending the edges of the flowers a bit with the grass, so it would look like they are growing from the ground:

[pappou]

Now i see what you mean; i didn't know whether you had some sort of 50-50 mixture in mind or something more inventive. But i can see that this works quite well, a bit like Chacal's Japanese paving stones with the occasional leaf.

The problem with Chacal's leaf bits was that the leaves duplicated in a very strong axial system when they were tiled. I had to go back to do a lot of smudging and rubber stamping.

But i think that might not happen with your pattern. I guess it needs the tiling test. I did test your one panel for perspective effect. I wanted to see if the flowers looked ok without their stems when seen at a low angle (as opposed from directly above). They work out much better than i anticipated:

Jamey - flowergrass in perspective.png (213.23 KiB) Viewed 4251 times

You can see that i have stretched your panel out too much, but even then it does well enough to show that with tiling you should get a good perspective carpet.

Again, it would make your work more accessible if you opened up a Development Journal of just Textures – assuming the mods have no objection. I would surely like it. That would give you a fine catalog of all your work and make it available to everyone.

Thanks for you hard work, Jamey. You are better at this than i am, so now i don't have to worry about using my own raggedy stuff anymore.
PS: Have you tried rusty old boiler textures, like in Riven? I finally found some nice brass the other day. And i find that glass textures are lacking [they have lots of opaque impressions, but those don't look like glass anymore].

[Chacal]

What is the ideal image size and resolution for a texture?
My pictures are 3072 x 2304, so that it is easy to cut several 512 x 512 images from each picture, which should solve the tiling problem.
Furthermore, after Pappou's test I started taking several pictures (in a grid fashion) for each texture. So if I took eight pictures of a moss covering, thay can be assembled into a 12288 x 9216 picture. That should be enough material to prevent tiling problems.

[Jojon]

What is the ideal image size and resolution for a texture?

Well, you know this sort of stuff better than I really, but just as with the polygon count issue, this depends on context, within the level-of-detail/resource-usage department. How large an area does it cover? Will we see a lot of it? Close up? How much ram and pixel-pushing grunt do we have? Can we achieve the same look with a more conservative approach?

It seems at export time, all textures are rescaled to power of two sizes, so I suppose we might as well make them such to begin with. :7


Going slightly off-tangent; one common trick to make a texture more tileable, is to remove larger scale detail by mixing it 50/50 with a heavily blurred, negative copy of itself. This will produce a very low contrast and -saturation image, which while extremely bland, can (even with quite a bit of further balancing) easily be tiled over large areas, without giving you stark repeating patterns, where the original picture e.g. may be bright on one side and dark at the other. From here variation can be added using techniques such as vertex painting, blending with an image encompassing the entire area and superimposing spot detail texturing.

Here is one of Chaka Kal's ones btw... I pantographed wildly over the photo for a while, to produce this more-or-less tiling version, that is currently adorning a circular pathway in an age I'm half working on - I would like to keep it there, if I may. :)

[Jamey]

Here are some new textures fresh out of the oven I toyed around a lot with the last one in photoshop and was amazed to discover how a little change in the overall style of the texture can totally change it into a completely different texture with so many different uses, enjoy all!:








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