just something thats always confused me, are video game textures ever made from scratch, or are they mostly based off real images? I’ve looked at high quality textures in commercial video games and wondered how they got the textures so realistic and detailed (and how they’ve skinned the model just right)
Plenty are made from scratch. Others are just very well edited.
Those textures are not just a hand-worked image files that just happen to look so great out of the box. First off, you do need to have a good textures, of course, but you also need other things to make some tricks work, like normal mapping, which will give the character using the texture some “bumpiness”, so that it looks like it’s a real life textured object. I would suggest you go through some of Unity’s shaders to glean on some of the terminology used for different texturing techniques and then investigate what each one is used for, that’ll give you good insight into how developers achieve such level of detail and liveliness in their games.
Regards,
- jmpp
It’s a mix. Some games (mostly ‘cartoonish’ / not photo realistic) do indeed paint their textures, and others use stock textures. cgtextures.com is a great source, as there are many others as well.
they all require a lot of work. Taking a picture of a surface does not mean you are DONE. There are a lot of photoshop work to get it looking right, fitting it for the target game/platform.