Texturing

I've been practising my texture painting recently on assets for the game project. I learnt a lot about texturing while creating my witchdoctor piece and also my steam robot character (which I mainly did everything wrong and thus learnt lots of valuable lessons). The big differnce in my current texturing work and my early work is that I am really relying a lot less on photos, although I still use them sometimes for colour reference (using the colour dropper to pull rust colours out of a photo for instance), but other than that I try to completely hand paint my textures. There are several reasons for this, first eventually you are going to want to create something that it will be hard or impossible to find photo reference or even go out a take your own photos, and secondly although hand painting a texture may seem like a lot of work using photos as textures still requires a fair bit of playing around to make the photo useable. For instance you are always going to have trouble, especially on metal surfaces making a photo of metal look diffuse (as you want no strong shadows or highlights in your colour map, this is all handled by specular and other maps), and chances are you are going to have to spend some time removing discerning features from the photo so that if the texture is tiled or used multiple times people dont notice features that identify it as the same texture. Photoshop really has so many good features that you can create amazing textures (I'm not saying mine are but I have seen incredible work that I'm aspiring to), I have now cracked making metal textures appear a lot more realistic using nothing more than grunge brushes and layer masks. But anyway enough waffle, at the moment I'm pretty pleased with how the texture is coming a long, I'm working on building in rust at the moment, this is coming along much better since I found a really good set of rust brushes, now its just a case of playing around to get the best results. Its always great to preview a texture on a mesh as it's amazing how good you can make a simple box look with the addition of texture.