Custom Textures

[Draymore Jonstone]

Do textures all start with actual photos?  How does one obtain the stock to create their own textures?  I hope I'm wording the question appropriately.  Some textures that are seen in Sl don't appear to be actual photographs that someone took.  Does this mean that someone actually made them from drawings?

[Vegro Solari]

Some textures will be synthetic, produced by programs, some come from photos, and some are combinations of both! Totally hand-drawn ones are really rare.

Texture synthesis has been a vibrant area of research in computer graphics for a long time, so there are tons of tools to do it, including many that are free.  If you download Gimp, you can play with a metric ton of those yourself!

Photo stocks can be gotten for free on the net also, or you could go out with your camera and capture your own, they'll be more unique that way.  Then, again, you could put your pics into Gimp and play with them to produce the final result!

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Do textures all start with actual photos? 

No.  In fact few do.

 

How does one obtain the stock to create their own textures?

Many ways.  You can use photos that you took or photos that you have the rights to use.  But the way most texture artists do it is to create their own.....from scratch.

 

  I hope I'm wording the question appropriately.  Some textures that are seen in Sl don't appear to be actual photographs that someone took.  Does this mean that someone actually made them from drawings?

 

I think you worded it fine.  And yes, some textures in SL do not appear to be actual photographs because many are not.  They drawn by the texture creator.  Some are drawn from actual photographs, some are drawn by sketches or drawings, some are drawn for the creator's imagination contained on in his/her mind.  But some are created from photographs that are "enhanced" or altered by the creator.  And finally, some are actual photographs that are not altered at all (or minimally altered to fix minor flaws).

[Ciaran Laval]

Search on Google for creating textures in Gimp. Gimp is a free download, so it's the legitimate way to go for someone new to textures, you will find tutorials for making textures.

[Chosen Few]

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Vegro Solari wrote:

Totally hand-drawn ones are really rare.

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I'm not sure what you mean by that, Vegro.  I create most of my textures by hand.  So does just about every professional texture artist I know.  In every video game you've ever played, most of the textures will have been created by a human artist.

Maybe your definition of "totally hand-drawn" is different from mine?

[Peggy Paperdoll]

I'm not a professional by anyone's definition (as Chosen can attest too from all my silly questions and arguments to and with him over the years).  But I hand draw almost every texture I create.  I gave up on taking photos or pictures and modifying them to suit my wants.......it's so much more fun to do it from scratch.    I believe most texture artist eventually come to the same concussion as I have.  I see very few textures in SL that appear to be photographs (exception is real life photos produced as portraits or other pictures of real life......sea scenes, mountains, cityscapes, etc).

[Rolig Loon]

@ Peggy/Chosen --- I think it may depend on what the texture is being used for.  As I look around SL, I see very few clothing designers using photosourced textures.  There are certainly some, but most that I run across are hand drawn, as you and I have been doing for ages.  I see far more photosourced textures for buildings and plants.  People will take a photo of a shingled roof in RL and slap it onto a prim roof in SL, or grab a pic of a chestnut tree and apply it to a mesh model in world all the time.  (In fact, I bought a lovely chestnut tree recently from one of the larger nursery merchants in SL, and it's beautifully photosourced.)  I am not impressed by most of those textures, because the "creators" rarely take the time to balance shadows and highlights in them, so they don't tile well and they end up with unrealistic color and tonal variations.  Still, they seem to be the norm.  My own textures are far from the professional quality that someone like you (Chosen) create, but I take small pride in having made most of them "by hand".

[Sienia Trevellion]

There are a lot of ways textures are made. I create my own either from scratch or by sampling an image and taking a small part of it. For example, maybe I want to make a brick wall. I might take a few photos of brick walls around the neighborhood myself. In photshop I then cut out the bricks and mortar that I like. I piece these together until I achieve a look I like. Then maybe I decide I want to make it look like there is an old plaster wall worn away with bricks under it. I'd then take a photo of plaster, place it over the bricks in photoshop and then erase the areas of the plaster to show the bricks underneath it. Maybe I'd then add some vines on top. Then i'd consider that my own created texture from multiple sources. If you're looking for free images to get started instead of taking your own you can subscribe to photo sites that give a free image once a week. You can also use sites such as: http://cgtextures.com/

I hope this helped! Oh, one more thought if you are just learning... you can buy textures off the marketplace and then do something like what I described above. Mix and merge them (assuming you have full perm rights to the images). Use the metal edge of one next to the wood of another for example. Best of luck!

[Rya Nitely]

All my textures start off as photos - sourced from places like CG Textures, Mayang Textures or High Resolution Free Textures. I've never considered myself an artist and I couldn't draw, paint or do a texture from scratch to save my life - well maybe, but it wouldn't be what I want to achieve. I want my items to look as real as possible - I can only get this from photos. And when I work on a photo it can take days to get what I want, so the final product is often nothing like the original. I use the clone stamp tool or copy and paste to make changes. I hardly ever touch the paint brush because I don't have the skills.

Photos work for me for three reasons - because I want the item to look as real as possible, because I don't have the artistic skills to start from scratch, and because the items I create this way are very marketable.

 

[Nefertiti Nefarious]

I do several different ways:

The animals are photos, carefully selected and edited to look as good as possible without being graphics hogs.

 

These textures came from actual historic fabric swatches ... and were a PITA to get seamless for SL.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/9-Colonial-Cotton-Prints-Seamless/2832919

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/3-Tintable-Seamless-Hawaiian-Floral-Textures/293431

 

These came from pictures of cat fur

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/9-Brown-and-Auburn-Seamless-Fur-Textures/293452

The rest of the fabric and metal textures I sell are computer generated - there is software that can do a wonderful job of it. I spend a lot of time selecting the colors, setting and testing parameters, adjusting the final results.

This eyelet fabric set is the result of one run for computer generating and then a whole lot of masking, erasing and scaling to get a set of textures suitable for clothing designers to use in SL.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/17-Seamless-Eyelet-Fabrics-and-Trims-Tintable/2834349

 

And I've done some interesting things with computer manipulation of photos of real flowers, fur, and feathers that haven't been listed yet (and may never be).

[Rolig Loon]

Very nicely done, Nefertiti.  I don't know why it's so hard to find good lace textures in SL, but I have had very spotty luck over the past 6 years. Even the large texture stores seem to have a very limited selection. Now that I've seen yours, I'll know where to look next time I need one.  Thanks!

[Nefertiti Nefarious]

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Rolig Loon wrote:

Very nicely done, Nefertiti.  I don't know why it's so hard to find good lace textures in SL, but I have had very spotty luck over the past 6 years. Even the large texture stores seem to have a very limited selection. Now that I've seen yours, I'll know where to look next time I need one.  Thanks!

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I made them because I couldn't find an eyelet fabric I liked for a hunt prize.

 

If seamless and border lace is in short supply, I may make more.

 

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

I can only speak for my self here. But in general it 'depends' on what kind of texture or structure I need, and what sort of outcome / look the final result should have.

If its textures for buildings (like houses, brick-walls etc) where you want them to look most realistic it is sometimes good to start with photo-reference. But what I do in that case is to take this image and edit it /  make it seamless so that it actually can be applied to an object without visual references of seams or borders. And heavily remove all light informations and shadows as much as possible. (reasons for that see later in this answer)

But in most cases I actually use them only as 'reference' for painting the textures. Because Photos always have light sources already in them, and you can't really make one fit to the other, consequently.

Plus in game engines light is mostly defined internally / in the scene / environment. And thus you don't want any textures (or photos in that case) delivering these already and colliding with the internally added lights, and certain map types which define all of these influences.

Then in addition for me it strongly depends on what 'engine' I am making it for. I always find that in engines like SL which have a look of being almost shadeless, and with just a few influences of shadow and light, realistic photo-textures or structures that would normally require bumpmaps, normal maps and specular maps to look 'good', look rather out-of-place. And thus for those I prefer the traditional way of digitally 'painting' them. (means by using image editors such as photoshop, Gimp etc).

It also really depends on the 'style' I am aiming for. And in engines like this where you don't have all the fancy stuff (so to say) a more cartoon'ish style is mostly preferred (as you can often see also in other games with similar shaders and graphics).

If I however make models for full render-images or environments / engines with more capabilities. I don't even need to paint any textures, because you basically define the whole look and structures by their materials. Especially 'procedural textures' which define then features like  noise (to make rust, or rough surfaces and so on) and the final bakes and several material channels applied such as specular, normal etc will completely define the outcome / look of the rendered image/s. (Sometimes you use 'bakes' from those and apply them to your models to have a certain type of predefined light/or Ambient occlusion information already in the textures to spare rendertime in certain game engines)

But as Chosen already said, from the daily work I am also used to mostly produce textures by painting them digitally.
By doing it this way you can always ensure them to have the exact specs and fulfill the requirements of a certain engine, and strictly stick to the style you aim for.