What sort of textures do people want to see?

Tuesday, May 8, 2012 - 12:23

I'd like to start working on adding some more textures, but I need some info from folks (particularly 3D artists) who are actually looking to use those textures. At the moment, OGA is way short of cgtextures in terms of the amount of content we have available, but I think we have an opportunity to expand if we work at it.

So, I need to know the following:

What minimum resolution are people looking for?
Do you want raw photos, or do you want "processed" stuff (that is, textures that already tile)? Both?
I feel like we have a lot of stone and brick walls at the moment. What other sorts of textures would people like to see us add more of?
How important are normal, specular, and height maps?

I realize not everyone is going to agree on the answers to these questions, so I'd like to get a general feel from the community as far as what's needed, texture-wise. :)

Bart

arikel

joined 14 years 6 months ago

Saturday, May 12, 2012 - 17:45

1024*1024 seems like a reasonable minimum resolution for most textures (there will certainly be cases where bigger or smaller makes sense though)
I'd usually be looking for textures that already tile, but if the photos they come from can be attached it's even better. It's nice to know exactly where a texture comes from.
More metal textures would be welcome, brushed, polished, rusty, dirty metal... Also, wood (planks but also trees, bushes...), snow, ice, water, various fabric / clothe textures would be great.
I only ever use diffuse and normal maps for a texture, so i enjoy finding them in submissions, but probably someone else uses specular maps and feels the same, so as long as it's possible, providing those additional maps is probably important.

What would be really nice, too, is to have coherent texture packs. I'm not talking about sorting them like "15 grass textures and 20 concrete textures", but rather have groups of textures that work well together, textures that share attributes like style, brightness, colors... e.g. : a brick wall with a matching floor and ceiling, or a brick wall with matching door and window textures. Perhaps even packs you can model a whole scene with. Could the Art Collections be used to such effect?

Arikel

joined 15 years 3 months ago

Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - 09:51

There could be more grass billboard textures. There are grass textures everywhere but clearly licensed grass billboard textures are seldom. A whole "Billboard" texture category would be even nicer.

bart

joined 14 years 3 months ago

Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - 10:55

Silly question... what are billboard textures? :)

joined 15 years 3 months ago

Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - 15:24

My fault.

Billboards are specifically images that are always oriented facing the eye. Billboard rendering is used for rendering plants, crops, corn, grass, clouds, particles and impostors from a side-view. (impostors = pre-rendered image of geometry replacing the actual geometry for lower level of detail)

But that kind of "side-view" textures are useful for plant rendering even when not using that very technique.

Previously it was a popular technique for rendering pre-rendered 3d models (sprites) in 3d space like in the old days of wolfenstein, doom I&II and Duke Nukem 3D.

Best try image-googling: grass billboard texture

Or: grass rendering

OGA has some by yughues

http://opengameart.org/content/grass-pack-02 (and 01)

Extracting them and putting them up could be a start.

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What sort of textures do people want to see?