A Few Tips on Texturing

A few tips on texturing

1. Don’t Confine Yourself. Choose bitmaps based on their color properties. While the textures on this CD are characterized by type (plastic, metal, etc.) don’t let that stop you from using them any way you like. Once you strip away specular highlights and surface qualities there is often very little difference between a dirty bucket and an old piece of metal. With the right shader properties, most every organic texture can be made to look like stone, metal or most anything in-between. From whence a surface is derived is just a starting point.

2. Vary the Textures. Varying the textures each time will give them more impact. Stale textures lead to stale imagery. It’s quite easy to adjust the color, saturation, contrast, value, and tiling parameters of a bitmap from within most DCC applications. Reusing textures is a great memory savings and it speeds up workflow when cranking out a bunch of related materials. In addition, limiting the number of textures you use, but presenting them in a different way with each material, can be an effective technique; similar to a traditional artist using a limited palette of colors.

3. Rapid Prototyping. It’s often useful to rough out a complete texture before you spend time perfecting details. With respect to texture maps, the color map and bump map have the largest impact on the look of a shader. Next important is the shininess parameter. Everything else is either special case (i.e. transparency) or provides a diminishing return for the work involved. I start with the most important aspects of a material and build the material to a rough approximation of its final look. When I’m happy, then I’ll fine-tune the details.

4. Sloppy Materials vs. Precise Materials. I make a distinction between the two. If I need to make a precise and accurate shader (i.e. A character’s face) then I generally create custom maps for the entire surface. I start with the bump map and then use that as a reference to create subsequent maps (i.e. color, shininess, etc.) When building an object with generic qualities (i.e. a metal robot) then I’ll mostly re-use existing maps. I’ll create a variety of general-use surfaces mostly focusing on what colors and textures I want to place where and I’ll often do unmentionable things such as use the color map as the bump map. The basic idea is that if a surface does not need to be precise then find the easiest way to make it look good.

5. Customize the Textures to Fit Your Needs. You can work with these textures without special preparation but you'll get the best results if you customize them to fit your needs. All the textures are tileable wherever possible but some show a more obvious tiling pattern.