Good at meshing bad at texture

[iamyourneighbour]

Need help with texturing, particularly with making something from scratch. I am good with copying real life examples, or from a photo where I have reference.

I made a helmet out of an artist's sketch, the mesh is pretty nice looking and the artist really like it but I have discovered I am rather poor at dreaming up textures for something that has no previous examples (the drawing was just a line sketch) 

Any resource would help thanks ? 

[OptimoMaximo]

Texturing is a skill VERY close to storytelling, which is my only advice instead of resources. There are plenty of tutorials to achieve certain effects you may need for your project, however what you're really missing is the method to work from scratch. And the method is being an artisan under all standpoints. I expand better now.

Say your helmet is a medieval or even more ancient piece of armor. You are the story-teller who followed it from the forge to the current state. So, layering is key. 

You will begin laying out simple and clean base textures for the involved materials (say, steel and bronze), then start putting some hammer prints here and there (the blacksmith modeled it) and add some darkness (tempered steel tends to darken before it is polished again, but its carbon rate increases in the process. Adding darkness as a layer lets you make changes more easily at a later time for tweaking). Then the pieces are combined together (add rivets with Ambient Occlusion from both actual geometry and texture details) to give a initial blacksmith product to put on the shelf, where it sat for, say 4 months, during which it got dust from the street accumulating in the crevices (reason for having texture AO along with geometry AO,m it helps with the placement if used as mask). It comes from the medieval streets, so it's brownish rather than the dark grey our modern polluted cities provide. Then it is sold to an apprentice warrior, that eventually got killed (add some scratch details, bumps here and there, even heavy, along with another layer of AO for those details) and his equipment was looted by his killer, who threw it in the chest along with other loot (add stains of undefined stuff being later unsuccessfully cleaned off) before it ends up in the next owner's hands.

This is a very summarized and simplified example of how, for me, a quality texture should be thought to begin with, and it can be applied to any type of context, where as if the helmet was sci-fi looking, you would just change the involved materials, and what happened to that helmet, to something suitable to a sci-fi environment. 

Edited February 19, 2018 by OptimoMaximo

[Rolig Loon]

This is of course what it means to be a visual artist .... the ability to imagine your own unseen universe and display it for other people to see.  It's why I, too, am mediocre at texturing.  We all have our talents. <sigh>

[ChinRey]

20 hours ago, Rolig Loon said:

We all have our talents.

Well, both you and iamyuorneighbour certainly have serious talent at scripting so neither you has any reason to feel down.

But remember: talent is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Edited February 20, 2018 by ChinRey

[Anna Nova]

I'd start by using a search engine to look at photos of RL objects in the same class.

Some people can only visualize after seeing a lot of examples.

 

[Callum Meriman]

On 2/19/2018 at 10:22 PM, OptimoMaximo said:

Texturing is a skill VERY close to storytelling...<snip>

That post opened my eyes to a few things. Thank you.