[Garry Lacey]

I`m really looking for feedback on this, I`m just preparing to remake my texture collection and want to really put something special together. I really need to know what 2D and 3D artists want as far as textures go.

Some things I`m pretty sure about, lots of categories, good quality, royalty free, clear thumbnails and image size details etc but heres a few questions


How important are tilable textures to you?

How important is texture size? What size do you prefer? straight multiples like 512x512 1024x1024 or any size?

Considering the collection will be online would you be happy with 100% quality jpegs?

How important are really esoteric textures like graffitti walls, decal type images such as licence plates on cars or billboard adverts, photographs of stuff you wouldnt consider a texture but you would use within your work?

Any feedback on what you would really want from the ideal collection.

[Spitfire]

The difference between 2d and 3d use of textures is pretty important.

For the 2d part :

1. As big as possible. Minimum 2000x2000 pixels 300dpi.

2. Preferrably CMYK color.

3. Preferrably zipped .tiff format with jpg preview.

4. Tilability is totally unneccesary.

5. Original textures. We�ve all seen the 34567,5 variants of "rusted metal plate" by now.

3d�s probably totally different though.

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The Couch Pleasures Me!!!

[kaylon]

Game textures....

MUST tile in all 4 directions (appart from "tunnel" wall section) and have as little pattern as poss...no big splodges a gamer can pick out..

Today textures can be up-to 1024x1024 as most engines can handele that, however 256x256 is still the best size to re-size to.

Create game textures at Twice the finished size ie..512x512 or even 1024x1024 but NO bigger and at only 72 dpi (screen rez).

Game textures MUST be either 32x32, 64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512 1024x1024. This is so Gfx cards can process the texture information...if the texture is not square the engine will make it squre and add major frame rate (not good).

You can now leave textures 32 bit as most new engines and cards can cope, but it depends on Gfx card..Unreal can handle 32 bit, But 3dfx cards (older ones) cant, so you have to do em 256 color.

As far as format goes...well again engine dictates this. Unreal uses PCX, Quake3 uses TGA, JPEG, Genesis 3d uses BMP, some use PNG...nice format for game textures.

As you can see the format is a tricky one, it all depends on the engine you are using.

Hope this helps.

[mk]

for 3d rendering u need extremly big textures.
Textures around 20 MB each is nothing special. ok, you dont need such big textures for some low-Res animations, but u need 'em for Print-Media.
Tileable or not depens on the Texture and how they should be used. A Texture for a door does not need to be tileable...

hope it helps

mk

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[syntetics]

[Garry Lacey]

Thank you for the replies so far, not sure I will ever be able to put 20mb textures up lol purely because thats moving to a pay model for that kind of quality and online distribution of a large collection like that would be a bad move probably. Really need CD and DVD for that.

I guess 1024x1024 sounds like a good balance of quality vs storage space with a good range of applications for games 2d and 3D.

Anyway Im soaking up all this, I have my own ideas about what would make a good collection but I work in a certain way and knowing how other people work and use textures is what its all about.

So again thank you for the feedback, anymore?

[Frost]

Let's not forget 16-color techstures and below! With alpha, beta, VHF, and UHF channels! (some even support cable channels such as TMN and MoviePix, but it's not standard yet!).

Seriously however, one shouldn't bother with 256 color textures, as it's slower than 16-/24-/32-bit for the cards today to process because it has to look up the palette RGB table for each pixel during the rendering pipeline, and the card samples 4 texels per pixel when bilinear filetering is enabled (up to 8 texels in trilinear). Textures should be square because I beleive some hardware still has problems with that. Most cards today support 2048x2048 textures in up to 32-bit. Try not to use JPG.

[Spitfire]

You cant possibly satisfy everyone. Either focus on 2d use, high-end3d use or game3d use.

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The Couch Pleasures Me!!!

[Anthony]

I would provide two resolutions: 512x512 and 100+ x 1000+. Whatever you can fit on. TV shows are often done with very very low res maps, because it's not noticable on TV. Include appropriate alpha or bump and spec and diffuse map(et cetera) if you feel like putting in the time to make good ones for each texture.

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-Anthony
Carpe Carpem

[Ben Barker]

Kaylon: Game engines can handle non square textures. Their resolution must still be a multiple of 2 though, like 128x256.
Also the Voodoo 1 could handle 16 bit textures. Maybe 24, I'm not sure. In Voodoo OpenGL in Quake 2, you had the option of using TGAs as the sky texture. I think they were 24 bit, but it's possible only 16.
The 8 bit pcxs were required for software rendering only. You could turn on 8 bit sky for speed.

[This message has been edited by Ben Barker (edited December 19, 2000).]

[rdgraffix]

I do a lot of 2D art for print, and this is what I'd be looking for:

Big. Big. Really Big.
Yep, if they want to be usable at all they need to be huge, and good quality. Scans are often a lot better than digi-cam shots for those reasons.
I know it's a difficult balance to make, with the limitations of the internet, but I see so many texture collections ruined by the small file size, or over-compression.

Tilability is irrelevant to me - the few times I do need a texture to be tilable, it's easy to do myself.

Personally, I wouldn't use too many non-texture images. While they may be pretty, I find very little use for them exept for reference. When I do need such an image, the need is often so specific that no library will suffice.

I just saw that you are considering 1024x1024. That is very close to being too small - I would consider 1512x1512 or 2048x2048 a lot safer. Of course, if the texture isn't in focus then the higher resolution doesn't help. I know storage space can be a problem, but I'd rather have access to 10 quality textures I can actually use, rather than 100 that look really nice, but are too small to be of any value whatsoever.

Personally, I save my own textures at about 5500x4000, but, of course, that's for my hard drive or a CD, and would be inappropriate for the internet.

I hope that helps you to some degree, but I have one last observation - textures can always be downsized for the final but never enlarged. A game texturer can use textures created for a hi-res illustrator, but the same illustrator cannot use a small textures designed for a game engine. The larger file is safer, and also gives the game texturer the flexibility to focus on one area of interest or texture within the image.

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- rowan dodds
RD Graffix

[This message has been edited by rdgraffix (edited December 19, 2000).]

[Loki]

Rule of the thumb:

texture maps should be twice as big as they appear in the final render.

reason for that is all the stretching, filtering, etc. that being done to the image til it finally ends up in the rendering ...

[TheMilkMan]

Do any of you people work in the game industry?

1 Do not make any textures bigger then 512x512 most of the time people will be shrinking them to 256x256 anyways unless it is something really special like a heavliy tiling wall . Ohh and always e use .bmp format as it is loss less and can be shrunk without to much res loss.

2: Always make your textures so they can tile atleast on two sides..verticaly or horizontily. If you are making terrain textures you need to make sure they can tile 4 ways..same with floor and cieling textures unless the cieling is a hallway.

3: Try to make textures use dull colors like brown and greys..they can always be colorized later. Try not to make any obvious markes as it will tile badly over a large surface.

The best textures you can make are good sci- fi or fantasy based interior textures ..walls, doors ,ceilings ,panels, trim..etc..etc..a lot of people use these in mods!!


[This message has been edited by TheMilkMan (edited December 19, 2000).]

[Garry Lacey]

Wow, superb feedback! Huge thank you to everyone who has given opinion. One thing that has surprised me, not only on this board is the weight game developers seem to have had. I actually considered game textures as being much less important.

With everyones feedback so far this is how the collection will eventually appear.

256x256 tilable
512x512 tilable
1024x1024 tilable
2048x2048 non tilable

Each texture will appear in as many categories as possible and come complete with bump map. All stored in 100% quality jpeg format.

While this is a compromise for many and may turn away high end professionals, I guess what I want to create is a rationalised collection which any new or semi experienced artist can draw on as a total collection without having to trawl through a myriad of poor collections which contain the odd good texture. Real pro`s will surely draw on expensive collections and 4000x4000 TIFF`s really are worth paying for and don`t seem to fit into an internet based collection, not to mention the difficult obtaining royalty free images of this quality

The whole collection should start to become availabe in January, if any texture artists who have built up a personal library of scanned or digi photography textures would like to submit one or more I will happily credit you as author and provide links to your own sites within the collection, but images cannot be copyrighted, really everything has to be free for personal and commercial use or the there really isn`t any point in doing this

I`m still working on the 3D mesh collection which just rose to 260 models, once that reaches 800 thats when I`ll switch over and start work properly on the new texture collection.

I guess it all won`t really take off until I`m running competitions with good prizes for these kind of submissions but I`m getting there slowly