On the subject of textures

[Kierra]

Personally, I think that getting our hands on some high quality textures will give our work here at the GOW the extra edge we need....take our work from fan quality to "professional" quality.

Problem is, those professional quality textures aren't free at all. In fact, they're quite expensive

I think we need to work together on this, that whole "all for one, one for all" thing.

I think there are common textures we all need and should share amongst each other, like plants, rocks, ground textures, wood, metals, water, etc.

But I'm fairly certain that most of us have somewhat limited funds (I know I certainly do).

So this is what I was thinking:

Why not pool our resources, create some sort of GOW texture fund treasury? We donate and or raise money to go towards purchasing texture packages for all of us to use in the categories listed above, and create ourselves a texture resource library available only to us.

With access to professional quality textures, I think our work can really take off. Even, dare I say it, stand next to Cyan's.

Thoughts?

~Kia

[Nadnerb]

It seems to me that going out and buying textures goes rather against the purpose and the spirit of writing all this stuff ourselves, not to mention that the kind of liscence you'd get on a bunch of textures you bought would probably be more restrictive than anyone here would be able to deal with, as we're essentially giving them to Cyan to use freely, and of course, we'd want anyone in the GoW to be able to use them, which is, in effect, everyone in the world. I don't think anyone who's selling textures for money would want to sell them to you so you could give them all to the world.

[Tsar Hoikas]

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1970

[Kierra]

Well that is why we'd have to be careful to purchase textures that have no licensing restrictions.

It is true that the point of being a Writer is to make the ages ourselves, but that doesn't mean we have to make the textures ourselves.

We already have a ton of hats to wear--we have to be artists, architects, concept artists, storyline writers, builders....etc. And yes, we often make our own textures too. But not all of them.

I know I certainly spend at least 70% of my Age Building time scouring the internet for free decent quality textures. A lot of the time I don't find what I'm looking for.

And that made me think that I may not be the only one.

A Writer could be the best Age builder in the world, but if they are limited to low quality textures then their work will not be the best it can be.

I'm not saying we should buy all our textures, I'm just saying I think we should consider investing in some high quality textures that everybody here needs. We're all so different in style in technique that even if two writers use the same texture I bet you they wont use it the same way, so most likely there would be very little overlap.

Edit: ah, I see that great minds think alike. Thank you for that link, I don't recall seeing that topic before.

~Kia

[Lontahv]

Look at Cyan's ages. They mostly make all their own textures in PhotoShop. Why can't we do what they do (they have very little money as well )?

I think that what makes a good age is not completely the texture. When you look an an untextured Cyan-Age mesh it looks really good. When you look at a GoW-made mesh, it looks really bad (most of them).

I think maybe not buy textures but rather just have more people like Jamey. He makes his own textures (broad-use textures) and he also does requests (very age-specific textures).

So, all in all to have our ages look as good as Cyan we must have our ages healthy in both body and soul... err *looks around* rather; mesh and textures.

I just feel like this idea is appealing just because we don't have it and we haven't seen it's problem. It's like saying that "when we get to the moon the human race will have no problems.".

Just my opinion.

[Kierra]

That's an awful lot of work for one person, don't you think?

Cyan has departments. They have people that make their textures for them.

Here at the GOW, aside from the group projects, most of us do everything on our own.

I don't see how its sensible for one Writer to have to make all their textures themselves, especially when there are perfectly good already made textures out there. That just adds more and more work to their already full plates.

~Kia

[Nadnerb]

It's hard to tell if you read the topic that Hoikas linked to or not. When we have a "texture exchange server" set up, we will still be making all our own textures, it'll just be easier to share them with each other. That's my ideal situation. Everybody who sees something cool can photo it, put it up, somone can see that and shop it, and put that up, somone can see either of the former and build an age using them. None of it bought from anyone else, and no liscence to work around. Heck, I'll be more excited if tweek ever does any work on age textures, than if somone goes out and buys some. I just hope he'll feel like sharing them.

[D'Lanor]

I don't think the "low quality" problem can be solved by getting good textures. The hard part is custom UV mapping textures to a mesh.

You cannot simply pick a default Blender unwrap option and expect it to correctly slap any pretty texture from a repository onto your mesh. Both mesh and texture have to be custom made for each other. That is when you get high quality texturing.

The results of custom texturing can be seen for example in the teasers from Deux. From what I have seen in most user ages though I fear that many here are as clueless as I am when it comes to custom texturing.

[mar]

Am I a exception because I find it fun to make textures in photoshop?

That is one of the things I like the most of age building. I find texturing must more fun than the python stuff where my skull of will grind. I relax from making textures.
The only black site of it is that it cost a lot of time to make them nicely and time is something we have to little.

A good book for learning making textures is the book Marcello mentioned a
while ago : 3d game textures from Luke Ahearn. I recommeded it for everyone who want to learn more about texturing.

[Jojon]

And there we have it, mar pinpointed it -- not everybody on the guild will enjoy doing the same thing - there is just as much place for people who likes drawing and photography/retouching as there is for 3D modelling afficenados and I'm sure there is a talent pool to tap. As long as people of all different skills are willing to cooperate, to share and enjoy, we can safely go stuff our heads in a pig, without needing to restort to purchasing commercially offered material.

What I'm going to say next will come off badly, I know it already, but I'll say it anyway: once we bring in ready-made textures so blatantly (I do realise we are doing this already), without personal adaptations, the step is obvious to also use ready-made models and so on and in the end we'll be like the guy who buys some software that lets him swap between loops of prerecorded music, inluded in the package, who saves one of his mixes and then goes around bragging about the cool piece of music he "made".

Would shortcuts boost our creativity, by removing annoying speedbumps, or turn us into numb kit assemblers? -Probably a bit of both and probably dependent on the individual. :7