Hi everyone, I was wondering how do you make good looking Textures? I have been playing around with textures in Gimp 2.8 and I can’t figure out how. I have tried making my resolutions really large like 4096x4096 and they still look horrible. Any help would be appreciated.
Well we need a little more information than that. What kind of textures are you trying to make? Material textures like grass, metal, floor tiles, etc? Textures for hard-surface models? Textures for character models? Realistic or stylized? Depending on what you’re trying to do, there are lots of different approaches so the more information the better.
It takes time and skill to make good ones, but nobody will ever pay a dime for them. Poor artist.
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That’s a VERY broad question. Here’s an excellent book to read though on making high quality textures 
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Higher resolution does not mean a better texture. Best not to get bogged down with 4k maps if you’re still struggling to make simple textures - keep it at 512 or 1024 until you know what you’re doing.
Otherwise it’s very likely you’re just wasting that huge resolution and you’ll be wrestling with more pixels than you’re comfortable with.
What kind of textures are you trying to make? (Tiling, unique?)
What style are you after? (Realistic, cartoony, hand painted, other styles?)
What outputs do you want? (Diffuse only, normal maps, spec, gloss?)
Are you baking any of them? (Normals, AO, diffuse?)
What materials or effects are you having trouble defining? (Wood, metal, plastic, painted, rusty, polished, dirty, worn?)
Have a look here - TONS of good tutorials and information on all kinds of textures, materials and methods;
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryTexturing
Also;
i wouldn’t trust any game art related book to be honest.
Techniques they describe tend to be either outdated or completely detached from actual game development.
Reading some comments from that page confirmed my concerns on that matter.
Polycount wiki on the other hand has links to a few decent tutorials that everyone should read.
For realistic textures I take high resolution real world photos with my camera then pass them through B2M and export as bitmaps. If I can’t obtain the photo my self then I find them online. You then set them up to be tile-able (easy step). My issue is my first game is cartoon based and am going a hand painted texture approach, which really takes some serious artistic ability so have been purchasing them as I can find them.
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My main issue is I’ve tried making a 512x512 sand texture for terrain in Unity.Everything looks fine until I ran the scene. The texture was all blurry and smeared you couldn’t even tell it was sand. I can’t really tell what I did wrong. It looked fine in gimp 2.8 and it looked fine everywhere else except for when I ran the scene.
I figured it out. My aniso level was set to 1 so I set it to 9 and now it’s fine.
Hi everyone interested in create great looking textures, I use a pretty great porch, starting with a very nice reference picture resolution such as 2048X2048. I created depending on rather its needing to tile or just cover the uv space. An awesome high ploy with nice reference apply to it using spot light which also inside of zbrush 4r 7 then in the same program I make it a ploy-mesh 3d . I goto document and size of document and set the size to 2048X2048 . Remember that the resolution matters depending on what you are need it for. OK if you are still following me here comes my process! make sure you stay in the canvas side of Zbrush and not push the T to go into edit mode. Now in the space that is in the document window, start laying out layer by layer the formation that you need, such as bricks or rocks or what every the sky’s the limit. Once you cover it all then depending on rather you and making it tileable or uv space covering. If tileable then there is a couple steps extra you will need to goto the layer drop down and go the displacement and set the displacement to half the size of your resolution such as 2048 to 1080, 1080 to 512 and so on you do this for ether the H or V displacement and then you will need to fill in all the gaps that are created. After this you will need to brushed from the Tool UI in Zbrush they are singleLayerBrush and RGB grabber. You will use the RGB grabber brush and drag over the document size widow were your project is. Off to the left of your project you will see a window that says texture, right click it and export the texture to your project folder. Then using the SingleLayerBrush go to material witch is under the texture window and select NormalRGBmaterial and make sure your add button or subtract are off and you are in material paint mode. Paint the Normal over the same place you used the RGB grabber and do the same step you did for the RGB grabber. Wohlo you have a great next-Gen texture material to wow everyone with. Please enjoy and if you have any problems leave your message here to me and I will glady help. Thanks and “Power to all the Game Designer out there”!
I’m pretty sure you had some good intentions. But maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t understand a single word. Plus this thread is ancient.
Nipoco I was sharing how to make next-gen game texture using Zbrush!
and I know it was ancient
It’s clear that this is a Zbrush workflow. But it’s not very well written.
At least try to use some paragraphs to make it easily readable. And maybe pictures to illustrate what you mean. There is a forum for external tools, where you can open a own thread for your workflow.
Learn Substance Designer
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I think some people take pictures of the things they need to turn into textures.