I want to texture for games...now what do I do? Thread

I want to texture for games...now what do I do? I definitely need advice from professional texture artists. Here's some background on me so you know what I know already and you can tell me what I still need to learn;

I went to school for painting and traditional animation. I have my BFA. I paint in oils, acrylics, and digitally. I paint everything from traditional oil portraits to digital concept art. I've worked as an artist for a game company for 2 years and focused mainly on 2d concept art & game assets. I've been using Photoshop for over a decade and Painter for about 2 years. I've been painting with traditional media for way longer than that. I've studied lighting & color theory. I've created textures to be used in my digital paintings but never mapped them to 3d models. I have a pretty decent library of texture reference photos that I've collected over the years. I have very basic knowledge of 3dMax and 3d modeling principles. I'm not super interested in learning to model or animate, but being the traditional painter that I am I'm super interested in applying the painting techniques and theories that I know now to the game and film industry via texturing. If you wanna see my work so far you can find it on my portfolio site...charitywooddotcom

Knowing all that junk about me...what do I need to learn now? Do I need to fully learn 3dMax or a different 3d modeling program? (I hear good things about Zbrush) Do I actually need to learn to model or as a texture artist are you provided with the models already? Any good tutorials on creating and applying textures to 3d models? I don't really want to "go back to school" I'm pretty good at learning on my own, I just need a map of which way to go. Ughhh...from what I've been able to gather so far, I seem to have a foot in the right direction, now I just need to learn the fine art of texturing for today's games and fx.

Thanks for your help...much appreciated!

You don't need to learn any 3d program at all it helps tho, mainly for previewing.
One thing you should learn is to make everything seamless. So they can tile, i think thats the main difficulty, if you can call it that
other then that..no idea actually, the drawing self is the hardest.

you have any game or engine specifically in mind?

Pretty good drawings on your site. Paintings have some Hopper style, some are good illustration. I'm sure you could learn how to texture.

The program you'll use it Photoshop, Crazy Bump as a complement, maybe. I'm just learning this "art" myself. I also thought it would be easy to find tutorials on the topic, but here, on Moddb, either the pictures of tutorials are broken, or the information of the tutorial themselves is lacking or confusing. However, usually you get an UV-Map, which is the unfolded version of the 3D object. Imagine you were building paper models, which are glued together at the seams. That is essentially what an UV map looks like. It's a flat image of a 3D object. (keywords: unfold, unwrap, uv-map, skin)

First step is to paint a diffuse version of the texture, which means you just paint the colors of the object with little detail. (keyword: diffuse map)
Next you create the normal map from this, which is essentially a map that adds materiality to the color. Imagine a brick wall that's just painted - it would always look flat. However, you know from games that the walls have depth to them and that is determined by the normal map; of course, there are other ways to simulate depth on e.g. walls, but I'm just trying to explain what normal mapping does. It gives depth to a surface. (keyword: normal map)
Finally you use the Specular Map to add light properties to the material. In simple words - how much shine do you want on your object. This is were color theory comes into play, since the Specular map works as a complementary color to your diffuse map. If you have a blue base color and want white reflections, your specular map has to be yellow-ish (complementary color). Of course, by this rule, you can add all sorts of reflections to an object, which don't necessarily have to be white. (keyword: specular map)

I'm sure you can find much better information on the Internet, but I hope I could give you an idea of the three most commonly used types of textures. One thing I find very helpful is to look at textures from game models, in e.g. Unreal Ed or Hammer Editor/Model Viewer. It's interesting to look at how other people paint their textures. Texturing is a pain in the ass, but I see your point and I believe it's a far simpler way into the games industry than e.g. character modeling.

P.S.: For tiledtextures just use the "offset" filter in Photoshop and fix the seams manually (offset in x and y direction by half the length of your picture: 512x512 - offset 256x256 - easy). There is also a number of plugins to help you do this. Tiled textures are for environments, though.

Edited by: SinKing

Photoshop CS4 offers the functionality to let you place your canvas on a 3d model tho :3 so that could help to to sketch some stuff on the model directly

Hey, thanks everybody! I'm going to do a few practice textures with the suggestions you guys posted. Keep the advice rolling in THANKS!

I have CS4, do you guys know where I could get a couple different 3d models to practice texturing?

no idea whats the best place to start tho. I mean, texturing a UV Unwrapped humanoid..wel, thats about as hard as it gets i think.

I haven't given game engines any thought. Does it make a big difference in learning?

Not particularly, they mainly differ in their rendering methods and in which formats you can import the textures in, but Photoshop can practically import and export in any format

SoTotallyMe wrote: I haven't given game engines any thought. Does it make a big difference in learning?

it was more aimed at, we could direct you a bit so you could set up a experimentation/testing environment

If we are talking for maps/level design, almost all games and all textures use the same formats and sizes initially. Sometimes things need to be a special file-type, but 9 times out of 10.. thats handled by something else like a program or somesuch, so I wouldn't worry about that part as much. Models have been/have to be wrapped around the model though. Good luck!

Having artistic skill is definitely a great start. Knowing the applications is just as much of a 'must-have' as well. You should definitely be comfortable working at the computer for long lengths of time and your computer should be powerful enough and stable enough to work 'for you' as the primary tool. An underpowered and unstable machine won't get you very far if you keep locking up or you don't have enough memory to navigate through you work with any level of swiftness and ease.

While you don't necessarily need to learn modeling, it helps to understand some fundamentals like how objects are mapped, how faces/polygons/edges are used to create shape as well as the different types of maps that can be used on a model such as diffuse, bump/normal, spec and ao. This all help shed light on the methodology of texture mapping.

As has already been said, you can find plenty of info on texturing techniques for different engines but they will all differ in some way or another. Best to settle on an engine, a popular one, so you can focus on its methods and then have at it.

Good luck!

Edited by: Kreamalicious